Twitter has filed a lawsuit against five of the ‘most aggressive’ spammers and spam tool providers in order to reduce the amount of spam across the social network.
Twitter said it filed a lawsuit in the federal court in San Francisco in the US to combat those who build tools designed to distribute spam on its site and across the web.
It hopes that by suing the tool providers, it will prevent other spammers from utilising these resources to clog up Twitter with spam and possible malicious activity. The company also hopes the lawsuit deters others from spamming Twitter.
VentureBeat reports that Twitter’s targets include TweetAttacks, TweetBuddy, TweetAdder, and James Lucero, who posts misleading tweets about how to get singer Justin Bieber to follow you on Twitter and Garlan E. Harris who operates Troption, which provides misleading online auctions.
Along with these legal measures, Twitter’s engineers launched new anti-spam measures this week to tackle @ mention spam more aggressively on the site. It said it also now uses its link shortener to analyse if a tweeted link leads to malware.
