Blocky (@blocky_bot) is a crowdsourcing solution for Twitter spam. Blocky does not define what a "spammer" is, so let's discuss.
-
You follow me just to make me follow you.
It all comes down to this. Spammers can't spam if nobody follows them. Any relatively new account that already follows hundreds or thousands of people is a spammer because a human can't do it by hand (it has to be a script).
-
More than 90% of your tweets are links (to a single service or many, seemingly unrelated), retweets and quotes from famous people (often implemented in bots to look more human).
-
The website on your bio is a "social media marketing" company.
-
Many of your tweets contain the same set of hashtags or just rare words by which you're trying to game the trends system.
Most likely this account is part of a bot network who are all using the same set of keywords.
-
One or more updates in your timeline are about "making money online".
“Spamming” can describe a variety of different behaviors. Here are some common tactics that spam accounts often use:
- Posting harmful links (including links to phishing or malware sites)
- Abusing the @reply function to post unwanted messages to users
- Creating lots of accounts or using automated tools to create multiple accounts
- Spamming trending topics to try to grab attention
- Repeatedly posting duplicate updates
- Posting links with unrelated tweets
- Aggressive following behavior (for instance, mass following and un-following in order to gain attention)
Behaviors that constitute “spamming” will continue to evolve as we respond to new tactics by spammers. You can find a more comprehensive list of spam behavior in the Twitter Rules.