Twitter follow requests

[evwhore]

I have twitter set so you have to submit a request to follow me, and in the last couple days it seems like I'm getting a lot of follow requests from what I assume are spambots. Accounts with female names and photos followed by a small # of random characters, and although they follow several hundred other people, none of them are in common with the

Comments

[andrewhime]

Yeah, I get those too. It's really weird. I'm beginning to think that some basic AI research is occurring at the behest of spammers... where's it going to end up? Did CyberDyne get into spam?

[evwhore]

ISTR reading about people doing sociology research just to see how many people will friend back a completely random person (stuff like this has happened on LJ also I think?) but who knows.

[gunga_galunga]

I haven't made the default to be such that the person has to request permission to follow me, since it's easy enough to just block these people when I get the notices that they are following me. I get some, but fewer than I would expect. Most of the spam followers seem to be at least somewhat targeted based on other people I follow, i.e. when I added Hellmuth or Doyle, I got followed by some las vegas based sites.

One feature that might be useful from a privacy perspective is if you could hide who you are following and/or who are following you.

[andrewhime]

Annoyingly, Twitter doesn't always notify you about who has started following you via email.