There’s a tiny part of me that gets a little pleasure reporting Twitter followers as spammers. I think it has to do with the seeing their status changed from “following” to “blocked.” Seems as though Twitter has been getting the message too, because yesterday it filed lawsuits against some big-time spammers. All Things D reports: “The company continues to try engineering tactics to thwart spammers, but anyone who has tweeted about an iPad or iPhone can tell those efforts alone are not stopping the problem.” Twitter is also targeting people that provide the tools for spammers, like software that can search tweets for terms like “iPhone” then reply to the tweet with some bogus ad and clutter your Twitter feed.
From the Twitter blog:
One challenge in battling spam is bad actors who build tools designed to distribute spam on Twitter (and the web) by making it easier for other spammers to engage in this annoying and potentially malicious activity.
This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.
Finally we can all get back to Tweeting about… hmmm, let’s see what’s trending. Ah, yes! The important stuff: #ReplaceGleeSongsWithOrange.
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