Facebook Spam: is that why active users are frequently banned?

There’s an article by Glenda Kwek in the Sydney Morning Herald that discusses Facebook’s annoying habit of disabling user accounts. I’ve posted on this subject before, and I had a chance to trade e-mails with Glenda about the subject in more detail.

I was quoted briefly in the SMH piece, but here’s my response with a little more context:

Question: You wrote in your blog about how facebook needs these spam
controls. Could you elaborate a little on why and whether it has been
effective for facebook as a social networking site?

Answer: Practically anyone who uses the internet these days has run in to spam in various guises, whether it be spam e-mail, spam comments, or bogus friending and messaging on social networks. Pretty much any system for communicating online is susceptible on some level to being abused by spammers who are trying to push products or services.

One of the things that Facebook is trying to do is to marry our social lives online with our social lives in the real world, and when you have a network built on those kinds of personal connections, people become less tolerant of annoyances like spam. So Facebook needs to pay close attention to the signal to noise ratio, because their users will stop using the service if they feel like they’re spending more time dealing with spam than they are communicating with their friends and contacts.

I don’t have an inside line on what Facebook is actually doing to control spam, but so far they have done a far better job than Myspace. Some of that is probably controlling the creation of fake profiles. My guess is that they also have spam restrictions in place to keep people from flooding the newsfeed with junk. The people who are getting their accounts disabled appear to have been very active users, leaving lots of messages and importing lots of notes. Facebook probably sees that kind of activity as “spammy,” and seeks to control it.

I think the bigger spam issue for Facebook going forward is application spam, however. As you might be aware, Facebook has opened its API for developers to create applications within their system, and many of those applications are designed to spread very aggressively. If Facebook doesn’t put in some more controls for that soon, it might really start becoming a problem for them. In the applications we build for ourselves and our clients, we tend to look for a balance between viral components and respecting the user’s inbox.

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