I’m a moderate Twitter user. A couple of tweets a day, sometimes announcing new blog posts, sometimes engaging in conversations. This evening I managed to finally get some free time to enjoy my Twitter account.

The minute I started tweeting, in other words became active, I received 3 fried request. 2 out of these 3 requests were made by new accounts under the name “Jennyfer”, following about 2000 users.

Every account like this has one or two tweets maximum and all sound like this:

  • I’ve made $6000 last night with ‘Some name’;
  • $15.000 overnight. Click here to find out how.

It’s easy to see that these are spam accounts, and yet they average about 10 followers.

So, when I get a request from one of these accounts, what are my choices? Let’s see:

  1. Ignore the request;
  2. Block the user.

But what about my desire to actively fight spam accounts? What if I don’t want to “block” the user and protect myself? What if I want to report the user and protect everyone else?

I really think that Twitter needs a “Report spam” button and some text filters as most of the phrases these spam accounts use are standard presets.

So, Twitter, will you help the community actively defend itself?

Update: Until such options will be – if they will ever be – integrated, the one alternative is to follow Twitter’s spam dedicated account @spam, and report spam to them.