Twitter enlists users to help fight spam

Twitter has added a "Report as spam" feature to its service in an effort to get help from its users in fighting spam, the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

"Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable," a company representative wrote. "Click the 'Report as spam' button under the Actions section of a profile's sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done."

To stop users from simply using the spam feature as a weapon against others they don't like, Twitter said that "no automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam." That said, users who click the button will automatically have the profile blocked from following or replying to them.

Twitter's decision to add a "Report as spam" button is just another way the company is trying to combat spam accounts. It's fighting an uphill battle. Out of my more than 12,000 followers, I've found several that do nothing but spam users. That said, I do believe that the "Report as spam" feature will be quite helpful in limiting that going forward.

Of course, all that depends on our willingness to report others. I'm all for it. Are you?

[Michael_Martinez]

This feature will probably be used to bully people like so many similar functions on other social media sites (not to mention the ubiquitous killfile on Usenet) have been used to bully people.

For my part, I wasn't planning on following most people on Twitter anyway so if the reports are tied to who is following you, I suppose people like me won't have to worry about the inevitable abuse that will now ensue.

[paramendra]

This is key: "no automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam." I have been barred from leaving comments at ALL Wordpress blogs, and there is no place I can go to remedy that. I was an avid commenter, not a spammer.

[cvaldes1831]

This needs to be built into the API and supported by third-party applications because I rarely view Twitter on my computer and even more rarely in a web browser.

[sebastien.kalonji]

I do like the effort but I don't see the total picture. For me the spam is in my followers box not my updates. I don't see any spam if I don't just follow every follower I have. The tricky part is to be nice and try to follow your non spamming followers.

[isting]

You don't really need to follow the spammers. One of the ways that they spam you is by trending topics. If you tweet about something or someone that is a trending topic, they collect the Twitter accounts and @reply to all of the users.

There may be others ways, but that's what I've experienced.

[gabindr]

I think they are going to be very busy!

[lindyasimus]

Tweetdeck has had this feature for a while now. It is simple to block the user and report as spam as it happens.

[dataJONBOY]

twitter has been neading this for a while now. often, when you search through the public timeline or through a trend timeline, the conversation is littered with bots. some of them only ever tweet out one thing like "teeth whitening...blah..blah..blah" which would be fine if they were a teeth whitening company. but it's not @sweetjenny48 is not a teeth whitening manufacturer, perhaps she is an agent or sales rep though who only uses twitter to tweet out micro commercials. im interested in seeing how this plays out.

[twhiting9276]

I just ran across this this afternoon, and I can honestly say "THANK YOU TWITTER".
This is a feature that should have been implemented from the beginning, but at least they're learning from their mistakes. They will, in fact, be very busy though.