Even with an account (though I'm also not in the US, but in the UK) I've recently (many months) found the Twitter site to be about as unreliable as the old, early fail whale days (except instead of a cute whale, I just get the page refreshing back to the top of my timeline, or a tweet loading then replies failing to load).
I used to hardly ever see spam, except when looking at replies to famous huge accounts, now I get 2-5 follows/likes/mentions a day from fake accounts mostly of semi-naked girls with a link to a website.
And any reasonably active thread of replies to a tweet now surfaces the idiotic nonsense of blue tick subscribers to the top, rather than ranking by tweet quality/relevance.
I used to hardly ever see spam, except when looking at replies to famous huge accounts, now I get 2-5 follows/likes/mentions a day from fake accounts mostly of semi-naked girls with a link to a website.
And any reasonably active thread of replies to a tweet now surfaces the idiotic nonsense of blue tick subscribers to the top, rather than ranking by tweet quality/relevance.