Twitter Still Can’t Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accounts, Study Finds

Flooding the Zone
In an 16-month study of 1.5 billion tweets, Zubair Shafiq, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, and his graduate student Shehroze Farooqi, identified more than 167,000 apps using Twitter’s API to automate bot accounts that spread tens of millions of tweets pushing spam, links to malware, and astroturfing campaigns. They write that more than 60 percent of the time, Twitter waited for those apps to send more than 100 tweets before identifying them as abusive; the researchers’ own detection method had flagged the vast majority of the malicious apps after just a handful of tweets. But the Iowa researchers argue that their findings—which are based only on the one percent of tweets Twitter makes available through a research-focused API show abusive Twitter applications still run rampant.

Source: www.wired.com