Is Twitter Powerless Against Spam?

An interesting thing has happened to one of the weekly educators' Twitter chats that I attend: We've got SPAM! Over the past two or three weeks, what started as just a smattering of spam has turned into an all-out onslaught of off-topic, lewd, and derogatory images and tweets. However, we are educators - which means we love to solve problems. Our (awesome) moderators quickly chose a new platform, Google+, and those who already had an account were able to switch over easily.

Obviously, these incidents raise a few questions from the people involved, myself included:

• Is Twitter powerless against spammers? 
• Is Google+ a viable platform alternative for weekly professional development chats? 
• How can we merge the professional learning network developed on the original platform with Google+?
• Will we eventually have the same spam issue on Google+?

I am so excited to have an amazing professional learning network and am in awe of the work that they do. They will not be derailed by spammers. They will continue to meet weekly. They will continue to collaborate online. The only question is, which platform will we use?

Get it together, Twitter. We've got our eyes on Google+.

UPDATE: After weeks of intrusive posts by spammers, the most recent #satchat was nearly spam-free! So, the answer to my first question, is Twitter powerless against spammers, is no! Twitter has the power to stop the spam. I am interested to learn how it was addressed, and how much effort our moderators had to put into the effort. As far as the other two questions regarding Google+, I am still exploring how it can be used to continue my efforts to grow my professional learning network.