I’ve had no less than 4 conversations recently, either in the real or on Twitter, about the ever-increasing problem of pornography on Twitter.
People have asked me what I do to handle it. Honestly, for me, it’s so prevalent that I simply don’t have time to manually block each account. In fact, I don’t get notifications anymore about new followers at all.
But I am concerned simply because I hate having that junk on my network and I don’t want to give any opportunity, accidentally or not, for myself to see any of that mess.
What to do?
The biggest problem is that I auto-follow everyone who follows me which guarantees that I’ll be following that nastiness. Maybe I need some of Tony Steward’s juice about “social limits.”
So how are you handling pornography on Twitter? What are you doing to stay above reproach?
I am unpopular enough that I still get all my follow notifications. I look at the follower counts, if they follow a lot more than follow them then I don't usually block them, but I don't follow them. I do usually look at people that have reasonable follow/follower ratios and more than a couple tweets.
I straight-up block them.
I can't really think of any good excuse not to.
yeah, me too,
Yeah, I do the same thing – get the email notification and see if they have a good follow/following ratio, see how many tweets they have, and if all that looks okay, I'll try to follow. Otherwise, it's the good ol' block!
I get Twimailer notifications (I know sometimes they are not so reliable). Twimailer allows me to see the last few tweets , follower counts and profile info without subjecting me to more images than the avatar.
From there it is one click direct to the confirm block page.
Same goes for 'normal' spammers.
First, don’t use “auto-follow”, only follow those that you either know or are truly interested in following, hearing from and connecting with. And if you ever get tired of the tweets of anyone you are following, there is nothing wrong with unfollowing them. Remember it’s not about the numbers but about the real connections!
Sencond, check out TwitBlock, a junk filter and bulk blocking tool for Twitter users! TwitBlock can help you sort through your followers in order of their spamminess rating, and let you decide to block them or not. http://www.twitblock.org/
although it's not about numbers i auto-follow so that “real” connections have access to me through DM. that for me is well worth the auto-follow.
Just trued this, super easy and quick, thanks
Just tried this, super easy and quick, thanks
Nice tool!
Thanks for the tip in this site. I'll definitely use this.
Like Adam, I don't tons of followers every day so I am able to pick through the followers I do get. The porn ones are easy to spot and I definitely block them because the tweets have become really graphic. It started out with, "Hey look at my pics" to tweets now that sound like they were picked right from a porno movie script. I don't want people seeing that nonsense, so I block it out.
nothing can describe how I hate this – it is an intrusion to my morals that is not fair.
but they don't care do they.
I used to make an effort to block them, I tried twimailer – but they go down do often that I don't get notifications.
I found tweetblocker – that seems to be useful. I apply a few rules for a new follower:
if ur follow to follower ratio is lobsided to the extreme (the wrong way) and your name have a number that appears generated, then I will block it with tweetblocker.
Obviously I can make a mistake, but I doubt that it will happen often.
BTW, I noticed you changed your comment format. No more intense debate? Wonder why?
On this topic, I’m like most people. I think I have about 100 followers. Every few days I pick up some more. At the moment I just check to see who’s following me, and If i see the shady stuff I just unblock them. It takes no more than 1 min out of my week, but I think it’s totally worth it. I don’t want someone checking the list of people following me to see that trash.
never mind about the intense debate thing. At first the format looked different, but after publishing the comment it came back to normal. weird.
sometimes,if you catch him posting, it hasn't loaded yet…
ID must have been down or just not loaded.
Thats a tough question. Would love to hear a good solution. I haven't really been checking my new followers lately so it has been avoided. But going through and checking each one like some people are talking about puts the temptation right in your face.
I'm still blocking each one individually, but over the last few weeks, I've noticed a dramatic increase in twitter spam and twitter porn. I'll have to check out twitblock and tweetblocker, because I can see this becoming a huge problem.
I only follow people I actually know or people I am interested in. If someone I don't know starts following me I block them. I guess I am 'anti-social' on Twitter.
ha!
I still get notifications – normally I don't do anything with the notifications (but delete them), however, if I see someone with "1 follower and 934 following" I usually do a quick check and see if they're legit…most like that aren't.
***rant on*** The problem here is that Twitter needs to do more to prevent this kind of thing. I understand the whole garage-company mentality that they have, and its cool, but seriously. 99% of junk email directed at me is filtered by google.com and live.com. Why can't twitter do the same? ***rant off***
Just today, despite what I want to do, I now manually approve all followers. I just got tired of cleaning my follower list of this junk – I do not want people who may peruse my follower list to see that stuff. Thanks for the tips above. I will be checking out twitblock.
ranter-alert!
I agree! I keep googling "twitter porn spam" to see if the company Twitter is coming up with a way to deal with this. It is rocking ANNOYING to get this crap. I will say that it is easily recognizable as a girl's name with numbers after it.
it's gross.
i block
I vet my followers using tweetlater.com. I can't recommend this enough. I have it set to auto-follow, but I go every other day or so and just select who to accept, ignore, block, or report spam. It's great!
yeah, that's how I do my auto-follow.
this is a good site jonathan. I didnt know of this one yet. Thanks!
It’s time consuming but I go through my followers list every few days and try to block anything that has a naked picture or some girl saying things that I can’t repeat here. I also do not auto-follow BUT I do go through new followers and follow everyone who appears to at least be a legit human. Again, time consuming in the sense of spending 30 minutes or so every few days but I normally do it as I am multi-tasking something else… waiting for a video to render, etc.
One other thing… I like to go through and manually follow people versus auto-follow because, believe it or not, I actually like to see who is following in order to maybe create a closer connection. Many times I follow someone who is following me then I add them, if they seem interesting, to a group in Tweetdeck. I have a group setup for "Potential Close Follows." I use that as minor leagues. If, over a few weeks, someone in the minor leagues tweets things I am interested in then I will move them to a more permanent group. Again, a little more time consuming but so worth it when looking for quality versus quantity contacts.
I block all the accounts manually right now, but I think if it gets too bad i'll just have to do what you have done.
I don't auto follow. Sometimes it takes a while, but I go through new followers and vet them. I've got a filter in my Gmail account that tags Twitter followers, and I go through that list pretty regularly. I block anyone who is spammy.
Those sound like great suggestions. Thanks, John for posting this. I personally have been manually blocking them, but I agree with the recent rise in spamming. I will check out the blockers as well.
BTW, http://www.twitblock.org seems to work incredibly well. I don't auto-follow so that's not a problem. I do follow everyone who follows me if they seem legitimate. That way I can send them a personal thanks for the follow message. Of course, I'm lowly enough of a Twitter user that I can give that kind of attention. I couldn't imagine doing that several hundred times a day!
If you're offended by a public service and what it has to offer and who is using it, don't use it. Simple as that. Because of the supports of this post, censorship still exists! Spam is one thing, but if you are still offended by porn and naked girls (gasp), please do not breed or have children! The last thing this country needs is more bible toting hypocrites. Go read a book and leave everybody from the shore states alone. Middle America is lame!
For the Christian believer, porn is dangerous not because it's offensive. It's about putting junk in your mind. Sex is good – God made it, after all! – but when misused leads to heartbreak and all kinds of problems (and that goes for anyone, not just people of faith). Pornography twists a good thing and makes it evil, destructive, and meaningless.
This is why Christian teaching (at least, quality teaching) advises avoiding it. Many don't, and are paying the price with broken marriages & relationships.
God forbid anyone may share a piece of God’s story through their Twitter and one or many of these “porn” accounts see it and understand for the first time. I personally don’t follow them, but I don’t block them. I hope that maybe a tweet would make sense and change their world forever. Love God. Love People, no matter the cost.
Jeremy, your faith is touching, really – but I would guess they're not really listening. They're marketing programs (bots) – systems designed to drive traffic. The actual people you (and I) want to help are much deeper down the chain.
I think the risk of allowing that much foul content into your stream greatly outweighs any benefit to them for listening to us – because they aren't.
I avoid teh pr0n on twitter by blocking. While auto-follow might make sense for a .com or .organization, having to filter all that on twitter is way too time-consuming. Everyone uses twitter & social media differently, but I have to keep my 'following' list small. Tweetdeck has helped with its Groups feature (now on iPhone, where a lot gets checked), but really Twitter needs to have some kind of group and filtering in its API. Every app has to implement it on their own, making a real patchwork.
I appreciate you guys (and girls) who are taking steps, however big or small, to guard yourselves from porn. It means a lot to the women of your world. It's especially nice to stumble upon my husband's answer – and not "Hey, what porn problem?!"
I block.
I block and report as spam, not sure if it does anything to get them kicked off but worth a try
I actually have a section on this in “Tweeting Church” (which I hope to release this year). First, I use social oomph (formerly tweetlater) to vet my followers. Here’s what I look for:
If someone doesn’t follow anyone, but has tons of tweets (which are full of mentions/@replies), I never click any link they send me. I assume they’re spam and block/report them.
If they have tons of people they’re following, but have never tweeted, I assume they’re spam and block/report them.
If it’s someone I follow who sends me DM links, they usually say something spammy like “viagra,” and that means the person was hacked. I usually just inform them that they were b/c I’d want to know.
The newest kind of spam account is an account following tons of people 5:1 or greater following to followers, but all their tweets contain a single keyword that they retweet. I just got one of those yesterday with “church” as a keyword. It was obvious when some messages were about Kanye’s new album and some were about church.
What doesn’t work…truetwit. Truetwit makes you either fill out a captcha EVERYTIME you follow someone who uses their service, pay to use their service, or spam all your potential followers with messages about using it. They don’t have a whitelist so that you can say, “I’m a real person, quit sending me these things” (unless you pay). I ignore anyone who uses that service.
Paul
Great stuff, Paul, thank you!