Twitter’s 20 Most Prolific Spammer Avatars

How many of your Twitter followers are spammers? That’s a question that TwitBlock tries to answer by analyzing your network and looking for patterns.

As a result of scanning about 3,000 accounts so far and analyzing more than 100,000 blocks, TwitBlock thinks it’s come to a few conclusions about who some of Twitter’s most prolific spammers are – or, at least what their avatars look like.

TwitBlock has found that many spammers use the same avatar across hundreds of accounts. Not surprisingly, like other social networking spam, the premise seems to be a familiar one: use pictures of attractive people to lure clicks.

The full top 20 is available here [warning: some of the pictures are NC-17 in nature], and you can click on any of the user’s profile names to see how it was determined that they were a spammer. Tell-tale signs according to TwitBlock include a disproportionate follow-back percentage, sharing an avatar with lots of other users, and a high quantity of new follows every day.

I had TwitBlock analyze my network, and it found that about 10 percent of my followers were spam. I actually thought it might be a bit higher, though Twitter has recently undergone its own efforts to remove spammers (which is why you may have noticed a drop in follower count) as well. Some of those that TwitBlock identified aren’t necessarily spammers, but they are, to say the least, very aggressive users of Twitter.

One thing is clear though: spam remains a significant problem on Twitter, and they’re still in the early phases of effectively dealing with it.