I've seen a flurry of twitter spam lately. These are people who are following you but if you click through to look at them, you'll see that they are following 1,000 or more people (often more than 10,000) but have fewer than 100 followers themselves.
A couple of examples are twitter.com/amandatullis and twitter.com/belinda1211.
I particularly like Ms. Tullis' posts - she is multi-lingual, claims to be from Nebraska, refers to her "mum" in one post and in another describes herself as "a big guy with a TX truck". So, it's pretty obvious that she is a bot simply retweeting others' posts.
But, here's what I don't understand. First, what's someone like Amandatullis trying to accomplish? So, she retweets a bunch of posts from the people she is following. What does that do for her? It's not driving links to a website like a spam blog might. What's the benefit of doing this?
Second, why bother following people to retweet their content (if that's what they're doing) when you could simply pull the content from the public timeline feed. In the case of amandatullis, where it's coming from various languages, my guess is it probably is from the public feed.
Anyway, I'm probably missing something obvious here but I just don't see what the twitter spammers are up to, so I guess I'm not sure how diligent I have to be in blocking them. Please share your insights in the comments.
