My question is this:
Is there any way to check for the amount of spam/abuse reports submitted by other users on Twitter.com and other Twitter Applications?
I am amidst development of a complex Twitter application which requires in-depth integration of the Twitter API, particularly with the report spam/report abuse facilities. The application I am developing is a game in which Twitter content is generated automatically based on many configurable options and libraries. The goal of the game is to intelligently generate the most quality, most genuine, most interactive and most influential Twitter content. A feature of the Twitter API that would greatly improve upon my current scoring algorithm would be increased access to the report spam/report abuse data submitted globally by users.
Such a facility is virtually essential for the completion of my application. Because the more details of reports my application has access to, the better it can analyse the data and use it to calculate the scores. It does not require any user data of the report submission, although I suppose this would be helpful for other purposes.
It would also be helpful if there were a means of my application being able to read the full details of genuine spam/abuse reports submitted through Twitter.com and other Twitter clients, as it could then be used to analyse the legitimacy and the reason for each report submission.
I have noticed the Twitter API does in fact include the ability to submit spam reports from Twitter applications. However, no-one seems to have noticed that this facility could be open to abuse. For example: an application could be designed to “take out” other Twitter accounts, such as competitors, or be used for other malicious purposes, all by simply submitting spam/abuse reports automatically via. connected Twitter accounts. I mention this simply because it does not appear to require an actual user to submit a form on the client to report spam, nor does it appear to require additional details of why you are reporting the user. These details could be of assistance when auto or human report legitimacy analysis takes place, either by the client or Twitter itself.
If it turns out that it is not currently possible to access the global spam report data, surely it is something the Twitter API developers should consider addressing. Such features of the API would be infinitely useful for various types of Twitter applications and clients to analyse spam and filter tweets based upon the data for many different reasons.
