Twitter Fights Spam With New Reporting Option

Spam is something that can have a serious impact on Twitter: It annoys individual users, messes up lists of trending topics, and even makes the site look less suitable for businesses and monetization. It’s a good thing, then, that Twitter’s going after spammers with a new spam reporting option.

In the past, people who noticed a spammer would have to know about and contact a special @spam account. Now, they can just click a simple "report _____ for spam" link on a profile. You can see it highlighted below on John Cleese’s profile, for example (although rest assured, his recent tweet about the Nigerian lottery isn’t spam).

That screenshot also highlights a sort of problem, however. John Cleese is a famous comedian known all over the world, and his Twitter account has been verified. So if even he can be turned in for spam, it’s hard to know where Twitter will draw the line about acting on such reports.

Indeed, Twitter hasn’t said anything about the new spam reporting option – a big hat tip goes to Adam Ostrow here. Some guidelines may be necessary so that people and businesses don’t employ it against their rivals.

Still, this represents a smart and much-needed move that should help make Twitter a better and more useful site. Happy clicking.

There are 4 Comments. Add Yours.

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Nick Stamoulis
October 14, 2009 at 6:29 am

Great post about the new Twitter spam reporting option.

I wrote about this in my SEO blog and I referenced your blog post at the following URL:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/10/14/increase-twitter-spam/

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toni
October 14, 2009 at 8:53 am

Finally this was way overdue, it’s like a haven for spammers. Now for those horrible adverts and privacy policies on Facebook (are they really hurting for money that badly?) . . .

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Rob Wilcox
November 1, 2009 at 12:37 pm

We use HootSuite and the new spam reporting option defaults to a DM to “spam.” Ya really can’t DM @spam. You then have to change it to an @ which just clutters the public stream.

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GuestValerie Mosso
November 2, 2009 at 3:48 pm

…just a thought about this article. I had a ‘Newbie”, a senior citizen that doesnt spend alot of time on the computer, but is very active with surfing and emailing, ask me “What is Spamming?” So, believe it not, there are many internet users that dont even know what spam is, and more so in the context of spamming Facebook or Twitter.
For future reference, it may be more helpful to the ‘newbie internet public to do a brief mention of the meaning of spam as referenced on this article.