Many users have concerns about the darker side of social media. While it's easy to connect with friends, many times malicious folks have other plans for your social experience. Twitter is a particular concern, as anybody can contact you without being "friends."

Recently, Twitter has rolled out a few new features that make it easier to prevent spam from reaching your notifications. Sign into Twitter and visit the Notifications tab of your settings to tweak them.

Under Mute notifications from people: you'll see four new options. The most useful one here is Who have a default profile photo. Known as "eggs" by the Twitter community, these are people who haven't bothered to change the stock egg profile photo. Spammers often sign up for new accounts and start tweeting out garbage. They don't always take the time to change their profile pictures.

You can also hide notifications from people Who haven't confirmed their e-mail or Who haven't confirmed their phone. This can further prevent spammers who don't bother to link a real phone number with their accounts. If you want to really quiet your notifications, try muting everything from those You don't follow. Of course, part of the Twitter fun comes from interacting with people you don't know, so we don't recommend this unless you have a major spam problem.

Turn on the Quality Filter and Twitter will weed out low-quality notifications, as well. This includes duplicated tweets and auto-generated junk. Note that enabling these settings won't affect anyone whom you follow. If your uncle is a Twitter lurker with a default photo, you'll still see his notifications as long as you follow him.

For more, check out how we can fix online harassment.

Do you get a lot of spammy notifications on Twitter? Let us know if you enabled any of these settings and if they've helped you!

Image Credit: Kaspars Grinvalds via Shutterstock