Twitter said Thursday afternoon that it filed suit against several firms the service accused of developing tools that enabled Twitter spam.
Twitter sued TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, and TweetBuddy, plus James Lucero of Justinlover.info, as well as Garland Harris of Troption.com, accordin to a Twitter representative. A profile of a Garland Harris (who claims he is a "Troptions professional") lists him as chief executive of The Dream Factory.
A note on the Tweetattacks.com Web site claimed that the software was no longer available. The Tweetadder account was suspended.
Twitter said that all five were in clear violations of the Twitter terms of service, and that the company was sending a message that spam would not be tolerated.
"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," Twitter said in a blog post. "Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."
The Twitter spokeswoman also noted that the company has also launched internal tools to aggressively combat "mention" spam, which puts the user's Twitter handle in a post designed to lure the reader to a third-party Web site. Twitter also recently acquired Dasient, a security firm, and uses its t.co link shorterner to sniff a link for malware.
Twitter is not the only social firm directly attacking spam; in January, Facebook and the attorney general for the state of Washington sued Adscend Media, an ad network accused of encouraging the spread of spam via tactics like clickjacking. In November, Facebook also tracked down those responsible for a raft of pornographic images that briefly flooded the site.
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