Twitter slashes spam levels to one per cent

Twitter claims to have dramatically reduced the amount of spam on its micro-blogging site in the past six months.

The company said that spam levels peaked at nearly 11 per cent of tweets in August 2009, but had been cut to under one per cent by February this year.

Twitter said that engineers from its research team had been working hard to reduce spam, but also called on users to help out in the future by clicking the 'report for spam' link on any suspicious profile page.

This will alert Twitter to the account and block it from following or replying to the user concerned.

"At Twitter, we see spamming as a variety of different behaviours that range from insidious to annoying," said Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury in a blog post.

"Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter."