Twitter began an effort this week in hopes of preventing the spread of malicious links through its service. Sharing links is one of the most popular uses of Twitter, but it is also dangerous since spammer and hacker activity has recently been high on the site. As a result, users are led to inappropriate websites and in some cases, are forced to deal with malware attacks on their computer.

Twitter uses Google’s Safe Browsing API as it checks for fraudulent links. When a user posts a malicious link, Twitter deletes the tweet and returns a message reading: “Oops! Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site!”

At this point, the filter does not block malicious links that are put in url shorteners. However, some shorteners such as Bit.ly use their own spam filtering systems.

While security experts are pleased that Twitter is making an effort to improve its security, they also believe there is more work to be done. Nishant Jadhav, the Director of Product Management and Business Development at FaceTime, told WebProNews that Twitter’s tightened security could be a result of the U.S. Marine Corps’ move to ban social networking sites. He went on to say that the next step for Twitter and other social networking sites could be content-based filters.

Is Twitter doing enough to protect against malware? What other measures could they be taking?