Twitter yesterday filed a lawsuit against five of what the company calls “the most aggressive tool providers and spammers”, according to a Twitter blog post dated 5 April.

The company hopes that by taking on the tool providers they will be able to reduce the resources that spammers have at their disposal as well as deter other potential spammers from getting started.

The defendants named in the suit, JL4 Web Solutions – also known as TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, and two individuals, James Lucero and Garland E. Harris, are all accused of abusing Twitter’s systems and generating or facilitating spam.

Besides the legal action Twitter also claims to have instituted new anti-spam measures, including using the service’s link shortener to analyse whether a link is malicious or not.

Source: Twitter blog via PC World