Facebook – How to stop a Facebook app posting spam stuff on the Twitter account

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I keep getting tweets like this on my timeline:

@pascale_66: Awesome! I made $102.54 this week just filling out a couple of surveys. http://t.co/GwjDUPK9

I've gone into Facebook, followed the link but it gets to a blank page. No app in my Facebook account has permission to post on my behalf. I do I get rid of it?

Best Answer

Hi, first of all I'd like to share my methodology:

  • The first step was to find out how these tweets were being posted (e.g. using a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, a third-party service such as Facebook, or directly from the Twitter website). Until recently, this could be done from Twitter itself, but they've recently removed this information from the desktop version of their website. So instead I added your feed as a column in TweetDeck so I could see the source of the offending tweets.
  • Tweetdeck provided the following information for your latest tweet: 10:55 PM - 10 Dec 12 · web
  • This means that the tweets are being posted from the Twitter website, not via any Facebook app.

Now, to answer your question:

  • The Facebook app that is in the link is simply a vehicle, not a real app. Visiting the page linked to in your tweet results in an immediate redirection to a random site (which, surprise surprise, offers you the ability to fill in surveys with the promise of a financial return).
  • The most likely explanation for these illicit tweets is that you clicked on someone else's link (presumably in the hope of making $102.54 a week), at which point the website made use of a technique called clickjacking to use Twitter as if it were logged in as you.
  • Alternatively, you accidentally gave away your password on a page designed to look like Twitter's login page. This means that a dodgy application has your username and password and is using automated scripts to log in as you and send out the offending tweets.

Now, here's some solutions:

  • Change your password. This will stop these tweets from being sent out. If you use the same password on other websites, change these passwords as well.
  • Check this page for Apps you don't recognise and delete as appropriate: https://twitter.com/settings/applications.
  • Log out and clear your cookies for good measure.
  • Delete the offending tweets once you've logged back in.
  • Upgrade your browser, or use a secure browser such as Chrome or Firefox if you're not doing so already.
  • Be careful when clicking on dodgy links in future - if something looks a bit suspicious or too good to be true, then it's probably a scam to get your details or hack your social media accounts.

Hope that helps :)

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