Leave me alone, Twitter bots!

I have encountered Twitter bots that have either followed me, retweeted (RT'd) my tweet, or mentioned/replied my tweet. If I correctly understand how they work, these bots search tweets for buzz words.

For example, a_transformers RT'd my tweet about a Transformers joke (the one I shared in an earlier post). It's obviously a bot: it searches and retweets every five minutes (look at the timestamps on its posts).

A couple of days ago, I posted about emailing Microsoft regarding Windows 7. Then, I immediately get followed by these accounts virtually simultaneously.



A more clever bot is shakesp. It searches the Twitterverse for the expression "To [some string] or not to [some string]".

And then there's the marketing creeps.

I could make my tweets protected but then they wouldn't show up on the sidebar. I'll just block the bots, then.