INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Twitter is adding more nuance 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 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 from a fake
account, if it using the Reply function to send spam or if it 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&
For example, check any of @elonmusk 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
Trends.
And of course, spammers are often posting prohibited content, like malicious links, links to phishing sites and other dangerous
links.
Activity that attempts to manipulate or disrupt Twitter service is not allowed
We remove this when we see it.
You can now specify what type of spam you're seeing when you report, including fake accounts
pic.twitter.com/GN9NKw2Qyn
mdash; Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 31, 2018
But Twitter users will probably be most interested in
the new option to report fake accounts.
There been a lot of name-calling on Twitter today following the emergence of reports of Russian bots
and trolls flooding Twitter, in an attempt to influence United States politics with disinformation
Often, users in disagreements on the site will call someone &bot& as a way to shut down a conversation.
Twitter itself has been suspending
real bots left and right in recent months
It deleted 200,000 Russian troll tweetsearlier this year, for example, and suspended more than 70 million fake accounts in May and June,
according to reports.
Now users will be able to report those accounts they believe to be bots, as well.
To what extent Twitter will rely on
these user-generated reports over its own algorithmic-based bot-detection systems, or other factors (like IP addresses or suspicious
behavior), is unclear.
It also unclear if people can ban together to mass report an account as &fake& in an attempt to remove a real person
But someone will surely soon test that out.
Prior to the change, users were able to report spam but not the type of spam, Twitter
documentationtoday still confirms.
Twitter tells us the updated reporting flow will simply allow the company to collect more detail so it
can &identify and remove spam more effectively.
The feature is live now on the web and in its mobile apps.
