Twitter goes after alleged spammers in lawsuit

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Suzanne Choney

You're not the only one tired of getting spammed on Twitter: Twitter is fed up with it happening, and Thursday filed suit in federal court against five companies it considers the worst offenders on the spam front.

"We now have 140 million active users and more than 340 million tweets each day. As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers," the company said on its blog.

If you're on Twitter, you've probably gotten just a few new "followers" of your account who turn turn out to be offering you "free" Viagra or an iPad (or both), or some other nonsense.

While Twitter's engineering team works hard to prevent spam, it's a continual fight, the company said: "One challenge in battling spam are bad actors who build tools designed to distribute spam on Twitter (and the Web) by making it easier for other spammers to engage in this annoying and potentially malicious activity." Hence the lawsuit.

The five defendants named in the suit are the websites TweetAttacks, TweetAdder and TweetBuddy, and two individuals, James Lucero, associated with the justinlover.info site, and Garland Harris with the troption.com site.

Twitter also said Thursday it launched "new anti-spam?measures within Twitter ?to more aggressively suspend a new type of @ mention spam." Also:

... we now use our link shortener (t.co) to analyze whether a tweeted link leads to malware or malicious content. This helps us prevent users from visiting malicious links and helps us shut down hundreds of thousands of abusive accounts.

Users can also help by continuing to report and block the spam they see on on the short-messaging blog, Twitter said.

Check out Technolog, Gadgetbox, Digital Life and In-Game on?Facebook,?and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.

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