Anybody who has an email account has encountered Viagra spam at one time or another. But now it's becoming an increasingly common, and annoying, problem on Twitter. Given that Twitter has been around for over five years, it's surprising that spamming isn't more prevalent. Twitter has been pretty diligent about deactivating bad accounts, but spam is like a hydra: you chop off one head and two more grow back. And spammers have started stepping up their game - co-opting popular hash tags like #iranrevolution, "tweet-jacking" @usernames, hacking accounts. They also take advantage of the Twitter convention of shortening URLs through services like bitly, effectively disguising the true nature of a link until it's too late.
Some whiz kids over at the University of Akron's Department of Computer Science did some fancy research using data mining techniques to develop a method of identifying and filtering tweeted pharma spam. A high proportion of the spam they found was related to (surprise) Viagra. They reported a new Viagra related tweet every 30 seconds, which very informal observations will confirm as a reasonable, even conservative average. Of the V tweets I saw, about 80% were spam.
One repercussion of this flurry of spam, as a blogger at PharmTech points out, is that it poisons the well for pharma companies who want to employ social media to legitimately engage with users. What? You're not following @pfizer_news?
