Simple Twitter tip: here’s one example of a standard kind of tweet you should always immediately block and report spam. Here are the telltale characteristics:
- Just your handle (mine is @timberry, which you see in this example) and a link. Nothing else.
- A new twitter account with no face; just one of those egg pictures.
Warning: don’t ever click that link! It’s either just spam or worse (worse than spam is malware, tiny programs that attack your computer).
What to do?
I recommend you do a public service and block and report these people to discourage others. You could just ignore it of course, but this takes just a a few seconds:
- Click on the account name, as shown here … in this case it’s “Barrom Hall.”
- That opens up a quick profile, shown here below. Note in this case we see exactly what I expected. It’s a spam account, just created, with no real content, just spam tweets like this one, to other people. If I discovered this was coming from a more legitimate account, with history, and real tweets, then I might just ignore it. But this is classic Twitter evil doing: the account is just spamming people. So you hold your mouse over the small silhouette to open a drop-down menu, and choose “Report” as shown here. That will simultaneously block and report spam for that account. You’ve done good.
To be sure, this isn’t the only kind of bad tweets and spam to block. It is however, both the most common and the easiest to identify and avoid.