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An Open Letter to Twitter

December 15, 2012

Dear Twitter,

Thanks for your great service. I’ve enjoyed meeting people all around the world with your social networking platform. However, I do have a few concerns.

First, I’m concerned that some people have fake followers. Many users who have a lot of followers have some followers with an egg icon, a generic name that resembles a real name, 0 Followers and 0 Tweets. These accounts are apparently created only to follow users.

Several months ago, I was contacted by email by a company who tried to sell me 500,000 Twitter followers. Since then, I’ve been contacted via Direct Message (DM) and Tweet by users trying to sell me followers. Assuming it’s not a scam where they simply take your money, users are able to buy followers. A Google search can also produce a few companies who sell followers, targeted and untargeted.

I’m concerned that your verified user system is flawed. You say you verify users, so people do not get them confused with imposter accounts. However, some verified users simply have a lot of visitors and no imposters. Some have very unique names, too. To be fair, you should implement the verified feature for EVERY user.

I’m also concerned about direct message spam. My direct messages are so filled with spam, they are completely useless to me. My computer shows approximately the last 12 hours of DMs and when they’re all spam, how do I know if I received a legitimate one 13 hours ago? I don’t. Something needs to be done about this because they are useless as is.

Again, thanks for the great service. I hope you’re able to implement some improvements to fix the issues I mentioned above, though.

Sincerely,
Jason Gastrich
Twitter user