It seems like things are getting frustratingly mixed-meat flavoured for the beholders of our favourite micro-blogging network. It was only several weeks back that twitter announced they had trimmed their members database of a bucket load of spam accounts causing people to lose followers.

Today, a brief look at some of the top trending topics seems to show things are not a whole load better, take this screen cap for example:

Every single link on this page was to malware or spam. In fact only 2 of the posts where from real users –the post from ‘firtje’ although looking genuine actually links to spam.

It seems that spam is becoming the Achilles heel of most social networks, only recently has Bebo appeared to thoroughly address this problem and it had the biggest spam/bot infestation of any social network that I partake in. Considering I know a number of people who disengaged from Bebo purely from being fed up with constant harassment from bots suggests the problem was widespread enough to drive considerable numbers of users away. When matters get this bad it’s really starts to hit the bottom line and forces the business to take notice.

For this precise reason we ensured we built anti-spam measures alongside the auto-moderation system into Wetoc (our core social-media product) from the offset. For many businesses the threat of spam is simply too great to ignore until forced otherwise.