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This service is now closed. The following is for historical interest only.
This is a list of known spammers of various kinds on Twitter.
Spam on Twitter has reached the point that it did for email in the late 1990s and blogs and wikis in the early 2000s, with unscrupulous scumbags producing software that allows them to produce giant waves of fake identities which can be used to pump out unsolicited messages, or links to fake websites that ultimately attempt to get them money via numerous forms of trickery.
There are two kinds of commercial Twitter spam that we've identified so far: the kind that follow lots of people, and the "stealth" type that set up interlocking networks of fake accounts. You can see these on the list with a "follow factor" of zero.
In addition to that, Twitter as a social network has developed its own class of unfortunates that attempt to draw attention to themselves through spam-like methods, apparently for some dubious social rather than commercial benefit; or are sufficiently oblivious of "twittiquette" and other people's feelings to include them in some kind of ill-thought-through experiment. PROTIP: people don't like being used as guinea pigs.
This class of people has been neatly described in terms of the ratio between how many they "follow" compared to how many follow them:
1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer. — evan
Is this an iron-hard rule? No. But is it a good rule of thumb for spotting obnoxious people? Yes, it seems to be. We don't automatically add people to the list based on these ratios - all submissions to the list are been sent in by Twitter users, and each one is checked by a human before being added. Software is not in control of the process at any point.
The upshot is that as time progresses and the size of the Twitter network increases, you as a user are almost guaranteed to receive an email at some point saying that you're being followed by one of these undesirables; and they'll subsequently appear on the list of your followers - requiring you to go to their profile and block them.
SPECIAL NOTE FOR THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE FOUND THEMSELVES ON THE LIST
Bear in mind that in the quote above, "spammer" does not mean "commercial
spammer", okay?
If you've found yourself on the list, it does not necessarily mean
that we're saying you send commercial spam. The actual commercial spammers
really couldn't give a shit about this site, so if you're reading this and
mentally composing an angry blog post, it's extremely unlikely that's what
you are. That doesn't let you off the hook, though.
Thank you. We now return you to your regular web page.
At present, manually blocking the spammers and obnoxious people, once you're aware of them, is all that you can do. However, we're hoping that by accumulating reports of these people here, we can convince the people who run Twitter to take some serious action on the matter. We've also put together some helpful tools for finding out quickly if somebody's on the Blacklist, rather than you having to scan through it by eye.
See submit a report.
Original idea and all subsequent execution and operation by @hex. Credit is due to @rjray who egged me on with the idea of registering the domain and having an API while this site was still only a static HTML page on my website. And of course credit is due to everybody who's helped out by spreading the word or making a submission - thanks.
@-message or D-message (remember D-messages require you to follow first
though) twitblacklist or email
twitblacklist@downlode.org.
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