Fighting “Follow Spam”

A quick update on one of our priorities right now: Getting rid of spammy followers.

We’ve recently made a lot of headway, including shutting down several large spam rings that were responsible for most of these spammy follows.

We’re always improving our algorithms to catch these annoying bots, but one of the best tools we have are your reports. If you ever catch someone spammy following you, you can use this icon to report them:

Not only will you stop that bot from bothering anyone else, you’ll help our team catch thousands of stupid bots just like it. (Easier reporting is coming soon to our mobile apps too.)

Thank you for your vigilance, Tumblr.

I have noticed some porn bot followers disappearing before I can get around to blocking them lately, so good job, tumblr! Good to know we should report before blocking.

staff stop it porn bots make my follower count go up and it gives me that sweet sweet validation