Researchers recently launched a free spam-filtering service for Twitter that flags offenders for the microblogging service, which, in turn, removes the offending accounts.
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Spamdetector service crawls Twitter, using heuristics to detect spam accounts. Gianluca Stringhini, the researcher heading up the service, says the tool has a low false-positive rate.
"Around a year ago, we started observing these [social] networks, looking for malicious traffic...spammers show a very different behavior compared to real users, and therefore we were able to build a system that can detect them in a reliable way," says Stringhini, a researcher at the University of California-Santa Barbara.