The problem
Lately I’ve been noticing that people are reporting more spammy accounts to Twitter’s @Spam account. While this is a good thing, I’m afraid their doing it wrong.
According to the bio on @Spam:
The part that says “Follow us and send a DM!” is the most important part. Now I’m not sure that Twitter won’t be doing anything about the mentions they get regarding spam, but it’s not the instructions that have been given to people to report spam.
I use Tweetdeck for my browsing and tweeting and there is a function within each member to “Block and Report Spam” on a user. When this option is chosen, that user is blocked and a DM is sent on behalf of you to @Spam with the username in question. When enough people have reported an account as spam then Twitter suspends them. They also do a pretty thorough job of finding networks of spammers and mass suspending them. At one point there was even a massive drop in everyone’s twitter followers because Twitter suspended thousands of accounts based off new rules they were running.
On September 10, 2009, Twitter revamped their Terms of Service. Relevant to this post was the change in the Spam qualifications.
So what is the correct way?
The correct way to handle spam is to send a direct message to @Spam (link to Direct Message Spam) paste the username that you are declaring is spam and send the message. Don’t add any other characters. Don’t add your thoughts on why they you think they are spam. Just the username. If enough users declare a user account as spammy then Twitter will look into it.
See Also:
