14 DAY TRIAL // At one point, Twitter's growth in user numbers was only matched by the rise in spam on the microblogging service. As with the numerous fail whales, nobody liked the spam, but Twitter users have shown a great resilience to putting up with the service's various problems. Thankfully, they don't have to do it as much anymore, as Twitter is announcing that the amount of spam going through its pipes has dropped considerably in the past few months and is now as low as one percent.
"At Twitter, we see spamming as a variety of different behaviors that range from insidious to annoying. Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter. Like it or not, as the system becomes more popular, more and more spammers will try to do their thing. We’re constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we're happy to report that it's working," Abdur Chowdhury, chief scientist at Twitter, wrote.
It's more than just big words, Twitter has the sleek graphs to prove it. As you can see from the image, there's only one way to go for spam and that's 'down.' Twitter isn't saying how it's measuring the amount of spam clogging people's Twitter streams and DM inboxes. It's also not saying what it's doing to battle spam, but it looks like it's on the right track.
In fact, considering how big of a problem it used to be, having reached ten percent of all tweets in summer 2009, the fact that the Twitter team has managed to bring it back down so fast and by so much is pretty impressive. Then again, perhaps it was just really bad at fighting spam at first and has just gotten a little better in the meantime. Whatever the case, one percent of tweets labeled as spam is probably a number most people are more than willing to live with.