The head honchos at Twitter have decided to take action against the site's growing problem with spam accounts by giving users some new options to file spam reports. You'll see a new "Report as spam" link on the sidebar of each user's Twitter page, and a "Report as spam" action available from your followers and following lists. Clicking on either of those links will give you a chance to decide if you're sure you want to report, and then block the user and flag them for review.

Previously, reporting spam meant following Twitter's @spam account, and sending it a direct message with the username you wanted to report. There's no official word from Twitter on how the spam reports work, yet, but I suspect it's something like the way blocking worked before: i.e., the more times an account is marked as spam, the more likely it will be to get deleted. This seems like a much more efficient way to handle the spam problem, and it'll be interesting to see if it results in fewer bot accounts on Twitter.

[Thanks, Damon!]

UPDATE: Twitter's official blog post on spam reporting is up now.