Has a third-party app hijacked your Twitter account and is secretly inserting links into your tweets? I’ll show you how to stop apps advertising on your Twitter account and put an end to those unwanted tweets.
Last week I demonstrated how to remove yourself from someone else’s Twitter list. This week I delve into another annoyance on Twitter and help you solve it in six seconds.
Tweet ThisTweets are appearing on your timeline that are not from you
Your followers are receiving tweets from your account that look spammy. It’s not the sort of thing you want to be tweeting about.
A tweet by a third=party app showing how many unfollowed you this week, and a link to their website.
Some examples of these are tweets telling your followers how many people unfollowed you this week, or how you can get more followers by using a particular service, or some other form of advertising. It can be interpreted by those who follow you on Twitter as being a bit spammy.
Impostor’s tweets may contain dodgy links!
Tweets from some third-party apps mask the links in your tweets and replace them with their own links without you knowing.
Usually the worst thing these links do is promote their service via your account. But there is nothing stopping any service you authorise from inserting links leading to malicious websites. You don’t know how secure their system is and by granting them access you are also opening your acount up to anyone who is capable of hacking their system.
Revoke their access to your Twitter account
Thankfully, the solution is quite simple. You can relax, no one has hacked into your Twitter account and hijacked it. Instead, you have at some point in the past signed up for a service that requires that you provide them access to your Twitter account.
Most of the time this is perfectly OK but it’s good to be aware of what each service does before authorising them to use your account.
You can and should revoke access to your Twitter account for this third-party app. Here’s how to do that:
- Click on your Avatar
- Click on Settings
- Click on Apps
- Scroll down till you find the app
- Click on Revoke access
Go through these apps occasionally to revoke access to any services that you no longer use. If you revoke access to something that you want to keep using you can undo the revoke access action or simply provide access again when prompted by that app.
Read more about connecting or revoking third-party applications on the Twitter Support page.
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