I continue to be stunned by the number of headlines that are generated in the tech press about Twitter spam. The facts are quite simple: You cannot be spammed on Twitter unless you allow others to spam you. It is an entirely opt-in system–You must give others permission to contact you. The key issue isn’t the Twitter platform but users who see followers as evidence of their popularity or as a status item.

Let’s first look at the mythical Twitter spam problem.

Adam Ostrow over at Mashable wrote a piece about a Twitter “spam” software release. He was outraged, stating

Twitter spam is an ongoing issue

I’ve been on Twitter from almost the beginning and have nearly 1,800 updates. I have never received a spam tweet. Never. Now I’ve received spam follow requests, and Ostrow is correct in saying that Twitter should make spam registrations difficult, but that’s a far cry from saying it has a spam problem.

My feeling is that Twitter is probably more frustrating for spammers than users. You can run all the software you want, but it requires someone to follow you back to spam them, and that is–as I said–opt in. Where this starts to fall apart is what I call the “follow and be followed” problem–users who follow tons of people with the hope that they’ll follow them back. 

This isn’t really a problem, as Twitter is such an elegantly simple system that reasonable people can just ignore them. I completely disagree with Michael Pinto, who ranted that “follow and be followed” people are a cancer and must be stopped. It’s really easy to stop them: Just delete their follow requests.

Where the follow and be followed paradigm becomes a problem is in spam. By blindly following everyone who follows you, you open yourselves to a wide swath of dialogue, and that can include spam. But, let’s be honest, that’s the price you pay for being so easy with your attentions. 

Now Ostrow makes the point that unsophisticated users will just follow anyone back, and thus this software and Twitter spamming in general can be effective and not only against those that Pinto railed against. That’s true if you take an unrealistically short view on things. What is more likely to happen is this timeline:

1. New user joins Twitter
2. New users follows anyone that follows them, thinking it’s cool to have a lot of followers even if they don’t know them
3. New user gets a spam tweet from one of these unknown users
4. New user stops following this person.
5. Repeat until lesson is learned.
6. New user is now experienced user and never follows anyone that they don’t know personally or by reputation.

The real issue here is one of education, not platform. Twitter is the perfect anti-spam platform because the flow of information and conversation is entirely under the control of the user. Users just need to be made aware of this.

I’m not sure what to make of people who crave lots of followers. the follow and be followed crowd are in many ways mistaking Twitter for MySpace. Plenty of users of MySpace see it as a competition to have as many friends as possible. The idea of having as many followers as possible (and following them to get them to follow you) seems to be missing the entire personal nature of Twitter. But again–this isn’t anything I need to worry about, as Twitter is entirely opt-in. They can do their thing, and I’ll safely ignore the noise.