As Twitter rapidly grows, people are making more concentrated efforts to take advantage of its traffic. In some cases, this means spamming it by creating a “trending topic.” According to Mashable, these trending topics are fairly easy to create, and once you start a trend it shows up on every Twitter homepage.
A recent trend today is “#twitterpornnames” or “Twitter Porn Names” which is a silly game where you find out what your porn star name is by combining your mothers maiden name with the street you grew up on. According to PC World, this might actually have been an attempt to gain sensitive information from Twitter users. After all, what are the questions you usually need to answer when you forget your password?
A further problem is that instead of creating some trending topics, spammers can also just include the trending topics in their tweets, and it’s like free advertising. Anybody that clicks the trending topic will see their marketing message.
If Twitter can help filter out the spam, then legitamite topics will more easily rise in popularity, making it a more honest and representative tool. This is our shout out to twitter, hoping that the problem gets fixed. (ps – also a large thanks to Mashable for keeping us posted about these updates)
