Twitter wants to kill spam for good

Twitter is taking aggressive steps to curb one of the biggest sources spammy and abusive tweets.

The social media company announced new restrictions on how developers can use its API, which could severely curtail shady developers' ability to exploit Twitter's developer tools. At the same time, the company has finally agreed to work with the developers of popular third-party Twitter clients so they can keep their apps up and running.

Abuse of Twitter's Application Programming Interface (API), the software that lets developers hook their apps into Twitter, has been rampant for years, though the company tried to clamp down on the issue in recent months. (Twitter first imposed its new, stricter developer policies in March.) The company says it has removed more than 143,000 apps between April and June of this year alone. That's in addition to the 142,000 apps it yanked during the first quarter of the year. These apps have been responsible for more than 130 million of "low quality" tweets, according to Twitter. Read more...