Hate Twitter spam? Now you can report it with one click

The head honchos at Twitter have decided to take action against the site's growing problem with spam accounts by giving users some new options to file spam reports. You'll see a new "Report as spam" link on the sidebar of each user's Twitter page, and a "Report as spam" action available from your followers and following lists. Clicking on either of those links will give you a chance to decide if you're sure you want to report, and then block the user and flag them for review.

Previously, reporting spam meant following Twitter's @spam account, and sending it a direct message with the username you wanted to report. There's no official word from Twitter on how the spam reports work, yet, but I suspect it's something like the way blocking worked before: i.e., the more times an account is marked as spam, the more likely it will be to get deleted. This seems like a much more efficient way to handle the spam problem, and it'll be interesting to see if it results in fewer bot accounts on Twitter.

[Thanks, Damon!]

UPDATE: Twitter's official blog post on spam reporting is up now.

Tags: report, spam, spammers, twitter