Reporting Spam on Twitter is Now Easy! But Don't Shoot the Messenger!!!

As social networking sites grow and try to better monetize their services, “new features” aren’t necessarily free (LinkedIn’s new Profile Organizer) and “new enhancements” aren’t necessarily better than their previous functionality.  In fact, sometimes these new features aren’t even accessible to everyone!  (LinkedIn Features: Does Everyone Have Equal Access?)  That’s why it is such a breath of fresh air to see Twitter adding a new feature which was truly needed: one-click, anonymous reporting of spam!  And it works like a charm!

The timing of this is especially important as the spammers on Twitter were growing exponentially and resorting to not only the old Direct Message spam but the new @Reply spam.  Since Twitter didn’t have a solution for stopping the spam that I knew about, I wrote a blog post just over a month ago with a creative solution that took advantage of the viral aspects of Twitter: How Can We Help Reduce Twitter Spam? Broadcast the Spammer! That post is still one of my most read and retweeted posts, so there are a lot of people who were getting sick of the growing spam problem.

It was after I wrote that post that I ended up having a lengthy conversation with one of my Twitter followers who said that everyone should report spam the “official” way: Follow @Spam on Twitter and send a DM with the profile name of the spammer.  In addition, you could go to the spammer’s profile and block them.  This also meant that there was no longer any risk to you because once you broadcast the spammer’s name, they can seek revenge on you by blocking you in return.

If you hadn’t noticed Twitter recently came up with their own new solution to the problem which I think is ideal: If you go to anyone’s profile now, you will see, in addition to the option of blocking that profile, the option of reporting a profile for spam.  Should you select that, not only will you be reporting that person to Twitter for spam, that person will also be blocked from your timeline!  No need to broadcast!  And no need to copy and paste profile names to a Direct Message!

It is now easy and fun to report spammers on Twitter!  End of story, but a big “THANK YOU!” to the people at Twitter who listened to our problems and made this happen!

But since we’re on the subject, this won’t stop new spammers from joining Twitter…can’t Twitter start looking at IP addresses and limiting people based on that information instead of simple email addresses?  It is just too easy to join and spam!  Any of you more tech-savvy readers of this blog have any proposed solutions?

P.S. The related articles below all take a different approach on this new feature by talking about Twitter asking its users to report spam, but all of the social networking sites have been doing this so this is not new.  What is new is the additional user interface to make this is easier for us to do.  But without preventing spammers from joining in the first place, we are in for a long fight ahead…

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• Twitter turns to its users for fighting spam (vator.tv)
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• Twitter enlists users to help fight spam (news.cnet.com)