Direct Message spam is out of control on Twitter. Here are two things Twitter should do ASAP to help fix the problem.
1 – Direct Messages were intended to be private messages between people. Twitter should enforce that and modify their Terms of Service to disallow automatic DMs.
2 – DMs should use a separate permission when it comes to third-party apps. Users can grant as many third-party apps permission to access their Twitter accounts as they want. Only non-web apps such as TweetDeck, SocialScope, and Tweetie would be allowed to use the DM function. Web apps would never be allowed to access the DM function.
This would go a very long way towards fixing the DM spam problem.