You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.
But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted. Jesse Stay explains:
Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.
But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:
We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.
I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.
