3 Comments »According to a new report out from Cloudmark, 20 to 40 percent of new profiles on Facebook could be fake. Neil Cook, the European head of technology services at Cloudmark stated “once set up with a portfolio of fake profiles, virus writers encourage users to click on links to malicious sites by including them on postings on other users’ walls or blogs.”
This highlights the increasingly challenging battle that Facebook is facing with spammers. Facebook has been heavily invested in fighting spam since early on. There are also reports that viruses previously found on Facebook are reappearing. MySpace had serious issues with spam early on which ended up driving many users away from the sight. Bogus friend requests and messages from spammers became unmanageable for many.
Facebook is now suffering from the same challenges that plagued MySpace. This will continue to be one of Facebooks most important focuses over the coming months.
Facebook will have a hard time cleaning these, but they must to continue to have credibility and NOT become MySpace.
Although, to be fair, the title of this post is a bit overzealous and will likely get spread far and wide before the truth does — that it could be true that as little as “Less than a Quarter of New Profiles Are Fake” which would actually be stunningly small given the spammer's aggressiveness.
20 to 40% is a pretty gigantic gulf when you're dealing with millions of new profiles a week.
This isn't surprising… I bet the ratio of fake to real profiles on Myspace is even higher. It's an epidemic? Why? I have no idea (except for the spamming reason - which I know isn't why all fake profiles are created).
20-40% of new profiles is not the same as 20-40% of the whole site