Social Media Spam – How to Protect Yourself
Most social networks such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter and all the others have some kind of friend system which allows additional privileges once a two-way friendship has been established. Friends are good, but spam is not. I’m seeing an increase in the amount of social spam these days, are you? If you are, don’t worry because you can easily take steps to avoid it in future.
Facebook Spam
One of the nice things about Facebook is that it is a closed system. People can’t email you on Facebook without being part of Facebook. It used to be that when I logged into Facebook that the only emails I got were from real people, however I’m starting to get an increasing number of spam emails. What do I consider spam? In the most part – a mass mailing that has been sent to a whole bunch of Facebook users, promoting something or other.
The way I deal with it is that I immediately remove the friendship status but recently I have been getting emails from people who don’t even appear to be on my friends list. Group owners can send a mass mailing to their group members but that gives you the option to leave the group when you get the message. People with fan pages can also mail their fans. So I’m not entirely sure how I have got these messages that don’t seem to be friends, from groups I belong to or owners of fan pages. Maybe it’s time to clean up my Facebook account!
However, no matter where these mails come from, there is a very easy way to prevent it from happening again and that is to block the user. After you have logged in, mouse over the ‘Settings’ link and click on ‘Privacy Settings’. There’s a section called Block List and a search box, search for the name of the spammer and that will do the usual Facebook search but give you a ‘Block person’ option against each one. You can also unblock them from this screen.
Stumble-Spam
This seems to be the biggest culprit at the moment. Most people know that StumbleUpon can drive a lot of traffic to your site but the traffic algorithm works mainly on the number of thumbs up votes that a particular piece of content gets. They have a system that allows you to ’send a page to a friend’ which will then force that StumbleUpon user to see your page along with a message from you when you next use your toolbar. Clicking on the usual Stumble button cycles through all of the sent pages first before drawing from the usual pool.
When you start getting a lot of these it becomes irritating because you see that you have 14 on them waiting for you (what prompted me to write this post heh!) and it makes you just not want to use the toolbar. Until recently StumbleUpon limited the number of mutual friends you could have to 200 which also limited the number of these that you got. I am open here and if somebody puts in a friend request I will always approve it. There is no need to be selective now that the limit has been raised.
However, there are ‘friends’ and there are complete strangers. Over the last year or so I have got to know a lot of people online and even though I have never met them I would consider them a kind of online friend so when those people send me stuff via StumbleUpon that is fine. But when somebody I have never heard of puts in a friend request and then immediately bombards me with a request to thumb something up – that is just spam.
Plus, one of the wonderful things about StumbleUpon is that it learns your preferences. You choose the topics you are interested in and it learns what you like so you should never stumble onto something you don’t like. However, the send-to-a-friend system bypasses these interests and people can send you anything. The original idea is that friends can recommend something that they think a friend might like but of course that has now just been reduced to an opportunity to plug something that you want traffic for. When people send me links to political debates (something I strongly dislike) I know that person has absolutely no clue who I am, what I like and is just spamming me. The result? A thumbs down to their page and instant friendship removal.
If somebody sends you something via the toolbar, a box with their profile name and a message (if they left one) drops down. Click on their name to be taken to their profile. From here it will show you are friends and you can simply click the ‘Remove’ link underneath it. If you want to go one step further, you can block a user on StumbleUpon too. Scroll down to the bottom of their profile and click the link ‘Flag User’, in here you can flag them for something or you can just block them.
Twitter Spam
For some odd reason, many people beleive that it is good manners to follow somebody back if they follow you. That’s fine on other social networks but on Twitter it makes the system unusable after you get past a certain number. I can’t handle more than about 100 people or it is just too much noise and I lose the people who I am really interested in. Despite having over 2000 followers I only follow around 70 right now. So as a result of this, I don’t get the Twitter spam that I am about to describe.
With Twitter, you can send a message to an individual by prefixing their username with the @ symbol, eg “@cmiddlebrook you rock!”. Most twitter clients will highlight this in some way and some also have a replies section that is separate. However, all the followers of the person who sent that reply will see it too so it is not used by spammers because all of their followers would see them spamming :-) The only way to spam on twitter is to send somebody a direct message. This is achieved by prefixing the letter ‘d’ and a space, eg “d cmiddlebrook you suck!”. Again, most twitter clients will highlight these direct messages in some way (I also have mine emailed to me), but the big difference is that the only person to see this message is the recipient – the other followers of the sender do not see it.
Now in order to be able to send somebody a direct message in Twitter there must be a mutual following so you can see why I don’t get many of them – I only follow around 70 people, so the other 1900+ that follow me can’t use this mechanism. But as I said, most people will follow back anybody who follows them (how do you guys keep up??) and thus are subjecting themselves to such spam.
The solution is obvious of course – remove the follow status. Click on their profile and click on the ‘Following’ link and then click on ‘Remove’. You can also block a user in Twitter – there is a link in the right sidebar of their profile.
Promoting Yourself Without Spamming
Now what if you are on the other side of this equation? What if you want to promote something and you want to use a mechanism such as Stumble-Upon’s send system? Follow a few common sense guidelines:
- Use the name of the person you are sending to. When somebody sends something with a message that starts with, “Caroline, I think you’ll like this” at least I know that they aren’t just mass mailing everybody.
- Tailor what you send to the likes of the recipient. This is a no-brainer but people don’t do it! On StumbleUpon especially you can look around somebody’s profile and see what they like so you should know whether what you are promoting is to their tastes or not.
- Promote sparingly – when I go away for a weekend and I come back and find 3 or 4 requests from the same user, I remove them twice as fast, even if it is somebody I know. Abuse the friendship and the friendship will be no more!
It’s all common sense really :-)
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funDiva Christy
November 14, 2008
A great deal of the facebook spam I get is that facebook allows event invitee spam. Meaning that if someone invites me to an event and I do not specifically “remove from my events” then any messages go to everyone who was ever invited.
The only way I have found around this is to log in every few days and on my notifications page click each and every “remove from my events” But the people who know this trick send a message right after the invite goes out, so theres little chance of me catching it in time.
I am pretty sure I have tried “ignore all events” and that didn’t work, I cant recall if the messages go thru even if you say “Not Attending”
I’ll have to experiment to see what happens. I just sent ya a friend request so we could actually set up a fake event just so we can play.
The thing that ticks me off the most is that I actually REMOVED the event and group applications from fb just cuz I thought that would eliminate the issue, and sadly it did not.
I hardly use twitter anymore, yet I found twitter karma to be helpful in sorting my friends from spammers (or annoying self-promoters!)
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
:) Christy
funDiva Christys last blog post..new goofus kitten