November 17th, 2009
Beware: Spam on Facebook and Twitter has reached epidemic
They say you’re really made it in the web industry once you are a target for spam, but it’s gone too far on Facebook and Twitter.
Besides nasty wall and mini-feed spam, Facebook’s group application has been the easiest place to phish users. Facebook needs to do a better job of detecting spam and protecting its users. Why don’t I have a “report as spam” link next to all those fake wall postings?
The bad guys are getting smarter too. Most of the spam links you see contain obscure short URLs so you don’t know where you’re clicking to.
Both Twitter and Facebook should have better ques to the user that they could be victims of spam.
Twitter’s @spam account is cool, but not everyone is following it. And how do you know it’s even owned by Twitter because the account isn’t verified…
Facebook hasn’t posted on their blog about spam in over six months, except to tell us that they won a lawsuit regarding it.
I think these social sites have a duty to protect their users. Do you think they could be doing a better job?
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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