Ham Spam Cripples Twitter

Fake blog posts along with lazy posters and automatic re-posting scripts are crippling the usefulness of services such as Twitter as a means for finding the latest news and trends in amateur radio. Recently numerous Amateur Radio blogs have appeared that seem at first to post a new article every few hours, however on closer examination each of these articles have the same standard content and are surrounded by advertisements. I have noted about twenty or so of these site all with the same garbage article repeated over and over.

Although this is not a new phenomena it has only just become prevalent in 'Ham Radio' and 'Amateur Radio' searches. Some well known Twits who have in the past posted some very good links seem to be failing for the trick, meaning that they are not reading the garbage before they Tweet it.

There is often a clue in the site name, which is usually something like 'Ham Radio Sales', or 'Amateur Radio Market', but this is hidden by the use of shortened URLs. Shortened URLs are popular on Twitter due to the limited space available for a message (140 characters).

Time for Twitter to come up with a 'block this Tweeter' or 'mark as spam' button. I suspect that these spam tweets and re-tweets may be what has been causing the server problems at Twitter. If they do not put their house in order soon I can see people leaving in droves