Pulling The Pin On Spam: Pinterest Begins Permanently Deleting Spammers

Dec 7, 2012 at 11:46am ET by Greg Finn

With its incredible rise to popularity, Pinterest has become a big target for spammers. New systems have been implemented to help identify and report spam. The Pinterest quality team has been busy analyzing report data and are now making a move to ban these fraudulent Pinners — forever. The bans will be “removed for good.”

Users may see a drop in followers in this clean sweep of spammers. Pinterest estimates that 99% of users will lose less than 10 followers. The Pinterest team is also exploring ways to prevent these accounts from ever being created in the first place.

For more info see the official Pinterest blog.

Image courtesy of Pinterest.

Postscript by Matt McGee: According to Mashable, several large brands and other popular Pinterest accounts are losing hundreds of thousands of followers in the aftermath of Pinterest’s anti-spam measure this week. Pinterest shared this statement with Mashable:

“We reached out yesterday directly to the accounts that would see the biggest drop to let them know and assure people that it had nothing to do with their pinning. In fact, the more authentic, interesting and popular you are, the more likely you were to be targeted.”

About The Author: Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that specializes in social media and search marketing services and web-based application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 6+ years and specializes in Social Media Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn. See more articles by Greg Finn

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Henley Wing

Glad to see Pinterest doing something about this. It seemed every other comment I received from a Pinterest pin was a spammy link.
http://socialmedianerd.se/per-pettersson/ Per Pettersson

Finally! It’s been too much spam for too long on Pinterest.
http://www.socialbakers.com/ Peter Kelly

I’m really glad Pinterest has used these measures to prevent spammers on their site. This will so much benefit us, the honest pincers, to stand out from the fraudulent spammers.