Earlier today the Telegraph ran a twitterfall applet on their Budget 2009 website to track messages on twitter tagged with #budget. Within a matter of minutes this had been discovered and exploited to great hilarity. I feel summed it all up with this tweet.

You can also read more about the whole affair on journalism.co.uk, the guardian and the financial times.

Are anonymous comments, whether on a general subject or a specific article like the Telegraph twitterfall a good idea in the first place? There are often times that I’ve wished to comment quickly on an article without having to sign up to the website, or appear as an anonymous contributor as this restricts the feedback flow which makes comments more enjoyable and valuable. Being able to bash in “Surely not another fuel duty rise in this years #budget” and have it show up below the article in question would be brilliant and allow comments to span a broader spectrum of society.

The problem highlighted by todays event is that these comments are now completely unmoderated, and highly subject to spam, in this comment harmless fun, but potentially more sinister. So, how can we help reduce this form of “abuse”?

Many of the tweets in the case of the register could have been kept off of the site with a simple profanity filter, this would have been highly trivial to implement at either the client displaying the tweets, or even in the search query submitted to through the Twitter API.

A more intelligent approach is based loosely on the ideas behind google’s pagerank technology, in this case we’ll call it the retweet method. The premise is very simple, in order for a tweet to be displayed on the page it has to be retweeted by an arbitrary number of people. Unfortunately this method has a couple of drawbacks; 1. An increase of retweets on the twitter network, which can be annoying. 2. This method is still susceptible to spam by someone determined enough to create the number of accounts required to pass the retweet filter.

Of course, the only foolproof way to protect against this form of comment is to have a human in the loop, however this removes a lot of advantages of running a twitter aggregator in the first place, namely the immediacy of what people are thinking at any one time, by the time the information has been processed and approved by a human, the moment has passed.

Perhaps in this case it was just the worlds of new and old media colliding, and this will be a one-off event, either because no-one will attempt it again, or because something is only funny so many times (with the exception of The Inbetweeners)

Comments on a postcard to @darkphnx