[Air-L] spammers & tweeters (2)

[Deller, Ruth A]

The same is true of email, and some forums and blogs that don't filter spam properly (the amount of spam I get on Wordpress is crazy but it all gets filtered out through WP's own spam filter or my approvals process, and moderating on three forums, I see the amount of spam we get daily that has to be deleted, even with anti-spam features in place), not to mention the spam wasteland that is MySpace these days - whilst spam and spambots are annoying, they're just a feature of the internet (much as those useless bits of advertising paper stuffed inside magazines are a feature of that medium).  They don't make any studies invalid, nor any medium too difficult to study, they just add complications (to certain types of study) but if they're affecting our data, I guess we need to come up with strategies to accommodate that in the way we've done for 'lurkers' rather than simply saying 'it's too hard'.

Spam followers could potentially be an interest of study on their own - you mention the oddest things (I mentioned lamb once, and I'm a vegetarian) and get a spam account for that thing following you.

(Hello, my name is @ruthdeller or @RadShef and I like abusing brackets)

Ruth

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Barry Wellman
Sent: 08 March 2011 17:25
To: aoir list
Subject: [Air-L] spammers & tweeters (2)

Here's a problem with spammers on tweeters. Suppose you're doing a 
diffusion of info study, and you want to track RTs and even the memes over 
a network chain.

Trouble is, some worthy folks (like someone who begins with @z) just let 
all Followers in, even though I betcha most are now spammers who never 
check Your posts (Narcissim, thy name is Twitter Spammers).

So any chain of communication is going to end with them as black holes, 
and we're going to get quant underestimates of the extent to which memes 
propogate on Twitter.


  Barry Wellman
  _______________________________________________________________________

   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
   Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
   University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
   Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
  _______________________________________________________________________

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