A recent SEC filing by Twitter confirms what everyone already knew: Twitter is deluged with automated accounts. Millions and millions of them!

Is there a startup sadder than Path? No. The answer is no, because no other app sends out Baby, come back to me spam emails as desperate as this one. "A ghost town here," indeed.

U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh cares about your reputation. That's why she decided that LinkedIn members can sue the company for accessing their external email accounts in order to send their contacts spammy marketing.

Futurist and Senior Vice President for Doily Engineering Brit Morin is resorting to a very unglamorous tactic to grow her company: sending out old fashioned spammy text messages. DI-Yuck!

This guest post originally appeared on Symantec.com. A few weeks after our blog post about porn and secret admirer spam targeting Snapchat users, a new spam campaign using sexually suggestive photos and compromised custom URLs is circulating on the photo messaging app.

How do you know your startup is bombing? It's so unpopular, even when users are getting unsolicited messages from robots saying "Make me cum now," there are so few of those users, it's like it didn't even happen.

Quantcast shows that the number of unique visitors to Rap Genius has dropped 60 percent since Google punished the startup for its questionable SEO scheme. Last year, unique visitors to Rap Genius only dropped about 15 percent from Christmas Eve to Christmas. Rap Genius has not responded to request for comment from Valleywag sent yesterday and today.

The cofounders of Rap Genius got lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings, courtesy of Google. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search, promised he was looking into the lyric site's SEO scheme. His punishment this morning was swift and brutal.

How has Rap Genius distinguished itself from all the other lyrics sites? With sweet, sweet old school spam techniques, or as Silicon Valley likes to call it "growth hacking." The tactic is so shady that Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, felt compelled to publicly state that his team is "aware and looking into it."

After Valleywag called out Circle, a contact list-bombing social network no one asked for, the company's CEO apologized via bloggy mea culpa, and pledged to be less annoying. Good!

The newest spam-blasting social app shares a name with Dave Eggers' fictional villain-company, and all of its charm. Why do startups—and their big-time backers—think they can get away with molesting your contact list?

Quora is a company with a made up name, two very rich founders, and a very, very ambitious goal: to categorize all the world's knowledge. Maybe that'll happen someday, but in the meantime, it's sending out some seriously annoying email.

We've already touched on the moral cost of spamming your users to rattle up hype—but what about actual cash dollars? According to an insider, Dave Morin's tiny social network is spending huge money to pester your friends to join.