Twitter Suit Targets Spammers: What it means for Your Sites

In its most ambitious spam-fighting effort to date, Twitter filed suit last Thursday against five of the most notorious tweet automation programs that were generating spam on the site. A post on the official Twitter blog announced, “This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

The programs the lawsuit targeted include the wildly popular TweetAttacks software, TweetBuddy, and a program called “justinlover” which was authored by James Lucero. All three sites were offline by mid-day Friday. The other two tweet automation programs named in the suit – TweetAdder and software by Garland Harris of troption.com – will likely suffer the same fate.