Twitter Sues Spam Tool Developers And Spam Offenders

Twitter on Thursday announced that it has filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court. The lawsuit centers around five companies that have profited from illegal spamming practices and spammers who used those companies spam based social networking tools.

While Twitter names five spam tool developers the lawsuit is also going after people who actually use spam programs to bother, annoy and generally harass legitimate Twitter users.

In a statement released by Twitter the company says

“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.”

Twitter is not only going after spammers in court, the company’s developers have been continually working on ways to filter out spam and remove spam based accounts from its systems. In probably the best example of the company’s spam fighting capabilities they have implemented the t.co link shortener, thus enabling links to be scanned for malicious content.

Twitter in the early part of 2012 also acquired anti-spam and anti-malware firm Dasient to help fight spam on the advertiser level.

In closing Twitter noted:

“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. Today marks an important step forward.”

Exactly how Twitter plans to target certain spammers in their lawsuit is a mystery although it’s probably safe to say that the biggest offenders will be targeted in order to send a strong message to other potential spam users.