The Red Monkey

Care to rid the Twitterverse of porn spammers, sleazy “social media marketers” and auto-follow bots? A new tool, long overdue, should help.

Today, Twitter added a “Report as Spam” option to user pages. You can also access this option from the drop down box on your followers list, making the all-too-familiar spammer purge more than just a selfless act.

The Twitter Blog says reporting a user won’t trigger any automated actions (so, if you hate us, doing as illustrated in the picture above should be fruitless), but it does flag the user so Twitter’s “Trust and Action” team can take a look. I’m guessing that the Twitter team will prioritize based on who’s getting flagged the most.

If I could ask for one more thing, it’d be a “Report as Spam” link accessible directly from the initial “HotGirlXXX is now following you on Twitter!” e-mail.  I can see why Twitter would exclude this, as you’d ideally look at a person’s tweets to know if they’re legit, but there are plenty of times when you can smell out spammers simply from their user names and follower/following ratios. And there are definitely pages I’d rather not see before reporting them as spam.

But I’m happy to see this feature anyway. This may be totally coincidental, but the trending topics I’m looking at now are free of spammers. Could real people be taking back Twitter?