We all spend enough time trying to stay away from spam advertisements which are constantly surging through the Internet without Twitter making it more difficult to do so. It seems some tweets containing adult content got retweeted by the official Twitter bot @toptweets, according to security provider F-secure.com.

Tweets from both @SkypeCamGirls and @CamGirlTrenity both somehow made it past the Twitter bot algorithm which is supposed to grab the “most interesting” tweets from the social network and retweet them. The tweets were amazing examples of obvious adult material and could have been easily identified as spam. One tweet led to a sexual partnering website - GetitOn.com - and even had the blatant hashtags of #nsfw and #sex.

The other tweet promoted an adult randomized person-to-person webcam site, Camsexroulette.net. This tweet also had a #nsfw hashtag, which may have led to many people immediately ignoring it. Still, this isn’t the type of material you expect an official Twitter account to be broadcasting and is an obvious embarrassment for the social network that see more than 22 million visitors to their website per day.

The offending tweets have since been removed from @toptweets’ feed and the accounts related to them have been suspended. Twitter is probably re-evaluating its method for selecting tweets to retweet. Even so, this is merely an example of what appears to be a growing interest spammers have in Twitter.

Twitter has had a long history with spam and viruses since its launch in 2006 and while there have been an ebb and flow in the rate of these attacks, at least 1 recent study has shown an increase in the past year. As more people jump on the 140 character bandwagon problems like this could very well increase unless something is done to prevent it. I do my best to stop spammers on my end, but I can only report so many accounts in one day. The ball is your court, Twitter.