The Verge:

Twitter spam isn’t a new phenomenon, but over the past few weeks the amount of it has certainly increased. I use the social network on a daily basis, and not an hour goes by without a tweet of mine from months or even years ago being liked by a spambot. It’s a practice that generates a notification designed to make you click into the profile, where you’re met with what’s typically a pornographic pinned tweet and a link that will likely bury your PC into malware oblivion.

Yup. I see this on a regular basis. Always wondered what the end-game for the bot creators was. Are they rolled out by the bad guys in the hopes of sowing malware seeds? If I don’t click on the link, is there any other path to harm?

Twitter claims it has a variety of systems in place to detect spam on Twitter, and that the company responds to new forms continuously to combat spammers. Twitter also relies on users to report spammers, but it’s not clear how effective this route actually is.

If there was a UI for specifically reporting spambots, I’d definitely use it. But the spam reporting in the official Twitter client is buried under the … menu, then under the word Report, with the options:

• I’m not interested in this Tweet
• It’s spam
• It’s abusive or harmful

I think Twitter would get more feedback/responses if they let me press and hold on a tweet and select Spambot from a popup menu. Much more direct.