Twitter is adding a more subtle difference to its spam reporting tools, the company announced today. Instead of simply flagging a tweet as posting spam, users can now specify what kind of spam you’re seeing by way of a new menu of choices. Among these is the option to report spam you believe to be from a fake Twitter account.
Now, when you tap the “Report Tweet” option and choose “It’s suspicious or spam” from the first menu, you’re presented with a new selection of choices where you can pick what kind of spam the tweet contains.
Here, you can pick from options that specify if the tweet is posting a malicious link of some kind, if it’s from a fake account, if it’s using the Reply function to send spam or if it’s using unrelated hashtags.
These last two tricks are regularly used by spammers to increase the visibility of their tweets.
Often, high-profile Twitter users will see replies to their tweets promoting the spammers’ content. For example, check any of @elonmusk’s thread for crypto scammers’ tweets — a problem so severe, that when Elon played along one time as a joke, Twitter locked his account.
Using hashtags, meanwhile, allows spammers to get attention from those people searching Twitter’s Trends.
And of course, spammers are often posting prohibited content, like malicious links, links to phishing sites and other dangerous links.
But Twitter users will probably be most interested in the new option to report fake accounts.
On Monday, in an effort to fight spam at the micro-blogging platform, Twitter trimmed the number of accounts that a user can follow a single day.
The San Francisco-based internet firm said that the total number of accounts that can be added to a user’s list was cut to 400 from 1,000. the Twitter safety team said in a tweet, “Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers.”
“So we’re changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.” Software programs referred to as “bots” who sometimes run Twitter accounts that automatically following massive numbers of real people, a portion of whom tend to reciprocate by following back.
High follower counts can then serve to raise the status of bot accounts, which can fire off the website links or marketing content in tweets or messages to followers. Twitter policy bars use of the service for spreading spam, which it defines as “bulk or aggressive activity that attempts to manipulate or disrupt Twitter or the experience of users on Twitter to drive traffic or attention to unrelated accounts, products, services, or initiatives.” Factors are taken into account by Twitter when determining if accounts are being used
