The explosive growth of social networks has given spammers a new avenue for spreading their endlessly unwanted advertising. Curious about this new and growing phenomenon, I spoke with three social networking sites at various levels of popularity and development about the potential abuses by spammers. They shared with me the varying successes of spammers to utilizing their sites.
Barry Schnitt, Facebook spokesperson, said that Facebook hasn't seen much of this type of abuse, noting that Facebook has already implemented automated safeguards:
"1. If a spammer creates a page, group or profile that points to spam, users will report it and it will be removed very quickly (every group, page and profile on Facebook has a reporting link).
2. When we find links to spam, either through reports from our users or our sophisticated systems that are proactively looking for them, we’ll remove the link across Facebook and will permanently block access to the destination. That means, even if the spammers repost it, Facebook won’t send users who click on it anywhere."
Paul Buchheit, FriendFeed founder, admits that his lifestreaming and social networking site has seen some instances of spammers, often imported spam blogs from services like Blogger, but so far, none of the attempts have gained much traction. Buchheit feels that the spammers seem to be poking around trying to see what might work, and with an industry that is very large and disorganized, there is a tendency to get a lot of different people doing a lot of random things.
When it comes to detecting spam on FriendFeed, Buchheit reveals:
"We mainly rely on user reports right now, and that's obviously subjective. There are some automated limits such as rate limits on actions. We try to keep a close eye on the system, and try to be very responsive.
"So far, it has been very random, but as the service grows, it may attract more attention. One of the funny things is that you don't have to be completely resistant; just don't be the easiest target. Like the bear story, just run faster than your competitor. Because [spammers] are motivated by profit potental, they want to be easiest."
The one attempt I was able to document appeared on Twine, with a spammer setting up a profile and Twine for his or her subject area. Twine CEO Nova Spivack notes that it isn't an effective technique, as each Twine account requires a verifiable Email account for set-up, and all links are set to "nofollow" which offers no help to SEO spammers:
"We have almost no spam on Twine to date, thankfully. We’ve had a million visitors, of which 300K are monthly, and 60,000 registered authors, contributing over 2 million pieces of content so far. Of that there have been only a few handfuls of spam posts. Spam has been statistically insignificant in Twine so far. This is partly due to the audience which is comprised of people who are quite familiar with netiquette in general, and the fact that one has to join and verify their email in order to post or communicate in Twine.
"It is also due to the fact the we have put “no follow” tags around all external facing links in Twine, so they really are not of great use to SEO spammers. In addition, we have limited moderation capabilities today and are soon going to be launching full moderation features in Twine. Our user base is also quite diligent in quickly detecting and reporting any inappropriate posts."
Spammers may have yet to find a useful way to exploit social networks for proliferating their messages, but attempts will undoubtedly continue as they look for the next step past Email for spam.
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