“But I didn’t Tweet that!!” Stopping 3rd Party Apps from Spamming using your feed

When you’re on Twitter, part of the fun is finding new people to follow. The excitement goes up when you get the message “You have a new follower!” and you click to find out who they are.

Sometimes it’s great – they look interesting, engaging, informative and even fun.

Sometimes you look at their recent tweets and see nothing but tweet after tweet of “I just found a new way to add hundreds of followers!” or some variation thereof.

Most of the time, these tweeters didn’t mean to do that – a couple of innocent clicks, maybe some nefarious actions upon the offending spammers’ part and wham… all of a sudden, somehow your feed is sending out spam. Eeep!

First, you can actually change your password. If you’re like me, sometimes you don’t like doing that because, darn it, you just got it memorized…

Second, there is another way – turning off their access.

To do this, you need to go to your Twitter Home Page (it will look like http://twitter.com/home) and you should see your name and picture in the top left corner. If you don’t (i.e. because you share a computer) then you’ll need to sign out and log in again.

Once you are at your profile, look at the top right-hand side. You will see some links:

See the Settings link up there? Click on that. This will then take you to:

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…the Settings page were you can see all the tabs for your settings. You will then need to click on the tab that says Connections, which will bring you to…

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… and this will show you all the programs/services/businesses that have access to tweet/see/participate in your feed. Find the ones that don’t look like you want, and click on…

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…the link in the application’s description that says “Revoke Access”

That’s it! Now go tweet some good ;)

Thank you to @lacouvee and @carolyncjjones for the inspiration!