In the past few years, Twitter's popularity has soared and the micro-blogging site is now the go-place for sharing bits of information. Now in its sixth year, Twitter addresses its issues in an adult manner: taking it to court.

One of Twitter's greatest problems has been spam, and now the company is taking the fight to court. On Thursday, April 5, Twitter filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court against five companies that create tools resulting in spam. The lawsuit names five defendants: TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, James Lucero of justinlover.info (the how to get Justin Bieber to follow you page) and Garland E. Harris of troption.com.

'Deterrent to Other Spammers'

"With this suit, we're going straight to the source," wrote Twitter in a blog post. "By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."

If in the past, Twitter mostly relied on its users to report spam, in time it came to realize how serious of an issue spam actually is. To address the problem, Twitter developed algorithmic solutions able to spot behavioral cues that point to spam bots, and in January it even bough security firm Dasient, a leading company in "malvertising" prevention.

Twitter Targets Tool Providers

In an email to Venture Beat, however, Twitter acknowledged that it is time for legal action, despite its large staff of anti-spam and security engineers working against spam content. "The defendants were in clear violation of the Twitter rules," a company spokesperson told Venture Beat. "Taking legal action sends a clear message to all would-be spammers that there are serious and costly consequences to violating our Rules with their annoying and potentially malicious activity. We've focused on tool providers; they have willfully created tools that enable others to propagate spam on Twitter."

According to Twitter, the lawsuit is just one step towards combating spam. The company will continue to develop further technical solutions and build its own anti-spam team to fight the issue. "Taking legal action is just one tactic in our anti-spam arsenal," added Venture Beat's contact. "This week we rolled out a system to more aggressively suspend a new type of @mention spam; last year we implemented a tool to determine if links posted on Twitter lead to malware or malicious content in order to protect users from them, and we're actively growing our spam engineering team to create scalable technical solutions."

Other Spammers Taken to Court

Litigation is hardly a surprise in the tech world. Several major companies, including Facebook, Google and Craigslist, have filed federal lawsuits against spammers. Facebook recently filed two lawsuits against Adscend Media, while Google went to court over online pharmacy scams and other online scammers. Craigslist even won an injunction and $200,000 after suing spammers in Federal court.

(reported by Alexandra Burlacu, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)