The situation is pretty bad, particularly for naïve users who automatically follow people who follow them. This activity, which many newcomers undoubtedly do just to be polite, opens the door to an onslaught of sales pitches from sleazy marketers.

Here's the bad news: According to a by Steven Kotler of Fox News, the situation is bound to get worse. Christopher Peri, CEO of , a Web-based app that helps manage income tweets and Twitter followers, says that spammers are getting more sophisticated, and that what we're seeing now is "Twitter spam 2.0."

What exactly does this next-gen Twitter spam look like? Using computers to find keywords and target specific users, spammers are unloading messages into users' timelines. Even worse, these unwanted posts now account for 10 percent of all tweets, Peri claims.

Twitter officials acknowledge they've got a , and they've taken action to fight the plague--albeit with limited success. For months they've been working to reduce the amount of "follow spam," which the official Twitter blog describes as: "...the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back. Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye."