Facebook has been aggressive at fighting spam on their site since early on. The first step was to limit group messaging (which reportedly won’t be restricted for much longer) followed by automated restrictions on users that were sending too many messages. Well now it appears that some spammers are getting aggressive and posting on walls across the site. A developer of a top 40 application sent me an email this morning describing his daily battle with removing spam from the wall and forum for his application.
Later in the day I was browsing through Facebook and came across the a post within the “No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!” group which had a profile picture of a nude woman and a link to a pornography site. Typical spam. I have to give credit though, after a few refreshes of the page the spam had been removed. Still, as the site grows in popularity, Facebook is facing an increasing struggle against a large army of spammers that are constantly trolling the site.
If you check out any large application or the wall of any network within Facebook, chances are you are going to see a ton of spam. Many users of MySpace were turned off after they received one friend request after another from fake users. While the misleading tactics had debatable results for the spammers, it had strong consequences for MySpace who saw an exodus of many of its users over to competing social networks. Do you think Facebook will be able to tackle the spam problem?
I would say that it may be easier than one would think to identify and eliminate spam. If google can do it for email (and email spammers are actually relatively advanced in their techniques for evading spam-detection), facebook should be able to do it for facebook.They seem to be having a lot of trouble with their facebook app stats (and a bunch of other things as well) so I doubt we'll see a spam-fighting engine released soon, but even the most trivial Bayesian detection mechanism would eradicate 95%+ of the spam (a statistic I pulled out of nowhere, but the actual value is definitely above a 90% detection rate for spam, then again you have to deal with false positives, etc. but w/e).
Comment by Charles — February 18, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
They just need a bigger team to police the "report abuse" button… and to be more strict with it
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — February 18, 2008 @ 1:35 pm
Compounding the problem is the addition of the review wall which can't be moderated by devs (a noble policy to prevent the deletion of negative comments). Those star review posts are a safe haven for spam and are never addressed even when reported.
Comment by Brian — February 18, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
I would say that it may be easier than one would think to identify and eliminate spam. If google can do it for email (and email spammers are actually relatively advanced in their techniques for evading spam-detection), facebook should be able to do it for facebook.
They seem to be having a lot of trouble with their facebook app stats (and a bunch of other things as well) so I doubt we'll see a spam-fighting engine released soon, but even the most trivial Bayesian detection mechanism would eradicate 95%+ of the spam (a statistic I pulled out of nowhere, but the actual value is definitely above a 90% detection rate for spam, then again you have to deal with false positives, etc. but w/e).
Comment by Charles — February 18, 2008 @ 2:27 pm
Compounding the problem is the addition of the review wall which can't be moderated by devs (a noble policy to prevent the deletion of negative comments). Those star review posts are a safe haven for spam and are never addressed even when reported.
Comment by Brian — February 18, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
The restriction on Inbox messaging is a pain! Come on Facebook – give us instant messaging! FB admins are quite on the ball – so much so that users are using Report Abuse button to pursue personal vendettas – case in point, my friend's account was disabled ASAP after someone accused her of spamming.
Comment by Ling — February 18, 2008 @ 4:05 pm
The restriction on Inbox messaging is a pain! Come on Facebook – give us instant messaging!
FB admins are quite on the ball – so much so that users are using Report Abuse button to pursue personal vendettas – case in point, my friend's account was disabled ASAP after someone accused her of spamming.
Comment by Ling — February 18, 2008 @ 5:05 pm
They just need a bigger team to police the “report abuse” button… and to be more strict with it
Comment by Jonathan Kleiman — February 18, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
The use of captchas virtually eliminates spam friend invites. You're right – My Space was plagued with them & this put a lot of people off.
Comment by Maggy Yong — February 19, 2008 @ 12:12 pm
The use of captchas virtually eliminates spam friend invites. You're right – My Space was plagued with them & this put a lot of people off.
Comment by Maggy Yong — February 19, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Think 20 FRIENDS had it bad?
Look at this group:
http://www.facebook.com/wall.php?id=8900080125&am...
Comment by Lina De Martinez — March 23, 2008 @ 2:00 pm