Twitter Targets Spammers in Lawsuit

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The microblogging service Twitter is targeting spammers with a lawsuit in an effort to curb the flow of unwanted messages in user’s timelines. The company filed a Federal lawsuit against what it said were five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers.

Twitter hits spammers with lawsuitTwitter hits spammers with lawsuit

“With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” the company said in a blog post. “By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal.”

Along with its lawsuit, Twitter also rolled out new systems to help stop spam posts from appearing, and started checking to see if URLs that pass through its own link shortener point to malware and other malicious content.

Twitter’s efforts come as good news since the company hosts over 340 million tweets each day from 140 million active users, and the growing number of spam tweets is frustrating to the people trying to use the service legitimately.

“We are committed to fighting spam on all fronts, by continuing to grow our anti-spam team and using every tool at our disposal to shut down spammers,” the company said.

Presumably Twitter’s filing was longer than 140 characters.

Jeff Gamet

Jeff Gamet

Jeff is the Mac Observer's Managing Editor, and co-host of the Apple Context Machine podcast. He is the author of "The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X" from Peachpit Press, and writes for several design-related publications. Jeff has presented at events such as Macworld Expo, the RSA Conference, and the Mac Computer Expo. In all his spare time, he also co-hosts the We Have Communicators podcast, and makes guest appearances on several other podcasts, too. Jeff dreams in HD.

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