Fight Twitter Spam: Kill the head, the body will fall

Shaun is about to go OFF on some Walmart spammers

This idea came to me, as all good ideas and many bad ones do, from an Anonymous supporter on Twitter, in this case NasdaqEnema. S/he did a blog post in classic Anonspeak, which contains a truly fantastic, elegant idea:

How many people turned their anti-spam efforts toward the root? All of the spam accounts mentioned a central account. Why not burn the money rather than try to stop every thief? Look at it from the spammer’s point of view.

Operation Radar would be gathering high follower accounts. We’re the mark. Operation Shield would be limiting scripts to posting within Twitter’s automatic script rules. So each bot has limits on its behavior. Operation Pulse is to bypass these limits by having an army of bots annoying people until they follow. People, for odd reasons, sometimes get curious rather than recognizing an annoyance as harassment. Operation Shadow is the message which points to the main account. This is then the real target.

Don’t go after the spammer bots. Hack at the root.

Decoded, here it is:

Kill the head. The body will fall.

Decoded from raincoasterese, this means when you see a bunch of spambots recommending you follow some other, central twitter account, report BOTH of them for spam. And, if you’re really vindictive like I am, see what website is in the bio of the central Twitter account, and report IT to its site host. In most cases, hosting agreements disallow illegal spamming in their Terms of Service. This way, you can kill not only the spambot, but you prevent other spam bots, since once the central site is suspended, there’s nothing to spam.