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| Image taken from onemansblog.com |
I'm writing this as a reaction to all the spam I've been receiving on Facebook, and after I found this Gizmodo article about one way to "filter" spam on Facebook that might be really useful to us all. This is quite long at well over 3,000 words, but I have a 10-point summary version near the end of this article if you just want the gist of it.
First of all, what is spam? [Source: Duh, what else. Wikipedia]
In case you haven't yet heard of the term, "Spam," electronically speaking, is the act of using electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. The word "spam" itself is related to the popular canned processed meat of the same name. As to the term we are talking about today, it started out in e-mail, where marketers would send out an e-mail in bulk to a large number of people.
Chain mail likewise could be treated as spam, because who likes chain mail? Forwarded mail (i.e. non-personal e-mail) can also be considered as spam. Especially if you don't like forwarded mail. Or if that forwarded mail is the type that isn't read at all by its sender. But some forwarded e-mails sounds so important and what not, the sender just has to send them to you. Some "evil" forms of spam are phishing e-mails as well as just pure scams that request for your name, birth date, bank account number, and other personally identifying information.
The typical marketing-type spam e-mails, chain e-mails, forwarded e-mails, and those "evil" e-mails have one thing in common: they are unwanted e-mails that are usually sent to more than one person. Today, e-mail services such as Gmail have automatic spam marking and filtering features. So where can spammers spam now?
You can also spam thru social networks.
I will probably talk about just this one for now. But basically you can also spam thru instant messaging services (like Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Messenger, Gmail Chat, and so on), mailing lists and other online groups (like Yahoo! groups, the Facebook groups feature, and so on), forums, blogs, search engine results, faxes (yes), text messaging, and so on. Suddenly, I remember this mailing list/e-group I belonged to where there was this one lady who kept posting stories and photos of her family and.... it was totally unsolicited! And it was being sent to all of us on the list. Unfortunately, she didn't know that there's a thing for that and it's called blogs. It was probably inconvenient for her to learn about blogging, and more convenient for her to just "blog" in our e-mail group. But it just became so much of an inconvenience for me, and maybe for the rest of us on that group, I left. Today, that group is virtually inexistent.
"But Facebook is not e-mail, so whatever I do on Facebook is surely not spam!"
Can you really spam through Facebook?
Obviously, YES.
And the first and very obvious way is through its Messages feature. It basically works like e-mail. You can send unsolicited forwarded messages, shares, links, and photos through the messages feature. Thankfully, Facebook has limited the number of people you can share to on Messages. But that hasn't stopped people from just simply writing a new message and sending it to another bunch of people. But that surely weeds out the novice spammers. Or, that has made a convert out of spammers who used to spam hundreds of people to now become spammers who just spam a couple dozen people. That is a big improvement.
But hey, don't get me wrong. If you need genuine help with something, don't hesitate to "spam" us. I've known friends who need help with their business, or with getting the number of likes up for their Facebook pages. Nothing wrong with that. As long as it's a serious thing.
But helping you with your job, like buying stuff you're selling, or doing the marketing for you by forwarding your marketing materials -- that's spam. And you're asking us to spam others, too? Please get out of our simple, quiet lives! "I'm just doing my job," is never an excuse. The end does not justify the means.
You can also spam thru Facebook wall/timeline posts.
This gets my ire a lot. My wall is what it is, it is my wall. You post something on it, it better be something really worth noticing by all my contacts. Imagine if your house had walls, i.e. it is your wall, and I paint something on it that you don't like at all? It's the same banana.
If you post something on my wall, and it's not really worth noticing by my contacts, but it's not all that bad, it will only reflect on you. But if you do it a number of times? Spam! The better way is to just send the share/link/message thru the Messages feature. If you cannot send someone Messages, you're probably on his/her block list of some sort. You probably shouldn't send him any of these unimportant messages. If it is a really important message, then contact him/her via e-mail. But if you've been spamming him/her thru e-mail before, he might have filtered your messages already (i.e. all mail from you are considered spam). Or sure, wall/timeline posts are then fine.
The thing is, sending any kind of message, spam or not spam, requires a lot of thought. "Would he/she really appreciate this message/link?" Please also consider that what you might think about how your recipient thinks is not exactly how he/she actually thinks. So please give it really some heavy thinking. How do you know if you think differently from your spamee? If he/she does not react at all to your messages/links. Or if he/she does, it's a little bit more of a "violent" reaction. Take note. Better yet, don't send spam at all anymore.
Another alternative is, ASK FIRST. "I found an article talking about so and so, and I thought it might be helpful to you. Would you like me to send you the link to that article?" I'm sure you will get a response. If the answer is no, fine, try again next time on another subject. If he/she keeps saying "no, thanks," or stops replying altogether, he/she probably doesn't ever want you sending such kinds of messages.
Use your God-given brains, friends. We're all capable of thinking.
You can also spam thru Facebook Groups and Facebook Groups invites.
Like the e-group story I told you earlier, I've belonged to this one FB group which is all about one thing and one thing only. Let's call that one thing "A". So in the "A" group, there are say close to 100 members, who have one thing in common: "A."
Why would you invite someone without any "A" to the "A" group? Maybe you can invite a "B" to the "A" group, because, well, "A" and "B" are related. But, why invite a "C"? Why, why, why???? Spam!
And then, why would you post something about "G" on the "A" group? Spam! The "A" group is not for "G" things! And why would you post three in a row of something about "G" on the "A" group??? Spam! If you just had one post, and it's talking about you (i.e. an "A") doing "G," then it's fine. But to just directly spam the Group wall with "G" things, and with three in a row of such... O. M. G.
A quote just came to mind: "Please forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." That, my friends, is precisely the problem. I'll talk about this in a while.
You can also spam thru Facebook friend invites.
Why "friend" someone on Facebook when he's not really your friend? Use the subscribe feature instead. If you can't subscribe to someone, then he/she probably disabled that feature or he/she doesn't know yet that feature, and so it wasn't meant to be. If you really need to become contacts with him/her, then add him/her as FB friend. If he/she removes you as FB friend, don't worry, you probably were never friends in the first place. Or, if you were friends or related in the first place, please don't equate being friends online to being friends offline. The offline world is where it should matter! Keep your online habits to yourself. You already know that, right? You should not have any expectations from your (true) friends. True love, romantic or otherwise, should not expect anything in return. Always, use your brain; you're smart!
But again, there's that problem of you or your friend not knowing about Facebook's subscribe feature (which is similar to Twitter's follow feature). Friending, you see, is a mutual subscription, but it breaks down when your view of each other is not mutual. Why invite more trouble in to your life, right? Don't invite. If your invite doesn't get accepted, that person is not being rude. Move on.
Oh, but what about those with so many real friends in real life, like thousands of them? Just be responsible always in all your posts, whether private or public. Basically once you add someone as friend on Facebook, you're adding one more possible victim to your (probably self-unaware) spamming twin.
A not-so-close friend, and former schoolmate added me as friend on Facebook a few months back. I thought I was just reconnecting or something like that. Turns out, she just wanted to sell me something. But she was smart enough to know that that was the end of it, after I had told her I'd contact her if I do need what she was trying to sell. Thankfully!
Think first before you hit that "Add Friend" button. For the rest of us, think first before you respond to that add friend request.
You can also spam thru Facebook apps/games and app/game invites and requests.
This is quite obvious. Facebook games like Farmville, and so on, make it easy for you to send invites or in-game requests to all of your friends on Facebook. The game can also flood your wall, and eventually your friends' news feeds. Eventually, your friends might unfriend you on Facebook, put you on their blocked list, or on their Acquaintances list, or just unsubscribe to you so that they can never hear from you again. Unfortunately for them, they do not know how to deal with spammers like you. Still unfortunately for them, you do not know how to channel those app/game wall posts to be visible only to the people interested in those kinds of posts.
You can also spam thru Facebook chat.
Facebook chat is basically like instant Facebook Messages. It's red apples and green apples. It's exactly the same thing, except for their appearance. Same rules apply for chat. Heck, same rules apply for everything.
You can also spam thru Facebook event invites.
Now we're getting into not-so-obvious territory. Whenever you get invited to an event thru Facebook, you automatically belong to an adhoc group of people who, like you, are invited to that same event. Now each FB event has its own wall which like I said earlier, you can spam all you want. Of course, not all posts there are spam. It's fine to read greetings and regrets and so on. But when you suddenly post something that should have otherwise probably been a private message to the event organizers? Spam. Your message gets to all the people on that list. Including people who most probably don't know you at all. They don't want to receive an alert about your message.
YOU ARE SPAMMING SOMEONE IF YOU TAG THEM ON PHOTOS THEY'RE NOT ON.
Oh yes, the very not-so-obvious territory. This is the FB spam that I hate most of all.
Tags on photos on Facebook are meant to highlight photos with you in them that are usually taken by other people (i.e. your friends, or friends of friends) so that you know what photos uploaded on Facebook are with you in them. Facebook will alert you if you've been tagged on a photo, and then you can appropriately request (your friend or Facebook) to take down that photo, or to remove the tag if you were incorrectly tagged. If you hadn't turned the auto-accept-tags off, tags will flood your timeline/wall like spam does.
There are certain people who do this thing quite often. It's a photo of them. Or of someone that is so dear to them. And then they tag me in that same photo even though I'm not in that photo. Spam!
Or, it's a photo of me and my wife, then they tag all sorts of people on that very special photo of just me and my wife! How different is that from someone vandalizing my home! Or from me and my wife on our honeymoon and a spammer deliberately opening the doors to our room with the "good intention" of "hey look, the two are so in love!" That's what it is. Spammers, vandals, privacy invaders, same-same. One is digital, the others are physical. To those poor souls who that spammer tagged on that photo of me, it's likewise spam, although to a lesser degree (but still wrong) than to me and my wife.
And then, there's people who post images - not photos - sometimes cutesy and what not, but still annoying to be tagged on because I'm not on that photo. Like those "these are my best friends on Facebook" image thing, or "my Facebook friend's birthday calendar" image thing. Or some meme. Please, people. If you find it amusing, most people most likely don't. Think first!
TAG FACEBOOK CONTACTS ONLY IN PHOTOS THAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY ON.
There are exceptions, though. Like I don't mind being tagged on a photo with my wife on there. I also don't mind seeing tags of moms and dads on photos of their kid (because there's a minimum age to join Facebook so those kids don't exactly have Facebook accounts just yet).
Again, quite unfortunately, spammers do not know. They think tags simply alert me to a certain photo or image. But they do not know that that tag will appear on my wall/timeline and on all my contacts' news feeds. And who wants that. Spam!
Some of them might argue, "but you can delete those wall posts or remove those tags!" But why would you want to punish me by having me do work that I otherwise would not have needed to do if you hadn't spammed me in the first place? Please, think first.
Anyway, obviously, the unaware spammers' intention is to alert people. But as I said, that's not what the Tags feature is for. Unfortunately, they do not know the Share feature, which is the more appropriate thing to use. Share the photo, people. Don't tag them. They're two very different things. Please think about it. Please try to understand. Many people don't want spam in their lives.
Basically you can spam in many ways thru Facebook because it has features similar to e-mail, e-groups, instant messaging, and many other not-so-obvious spammy ways.
So what can we do?
For spammers, self-aware or not, THINK FIRST.
Consider your recipients' reactions. No reaction means no one likes your message/post. It's spam. Some reactions mean only the people who reacted are interested. Otherwise, it's spam to others. It's all about using our God-given brains. We're all equipped with an equal amount of intelligence and it would just be a sad waste if we don't use them.
For the victims, the spammed, the spamees, BE VIGILANT. Have the KNOW-HOW. Make sure you yourself don't spam.
Like I said, check out that Gizmodo article I mentioned earlier. I myself have set-up my Restricted and Acquaintances lists on Facebook even before I read that article, and I almost never check my news feed (i.e. to try to lessen the chances of seeing spam). What has happened though is some people spam me in Messages or on my wall/timeline. Unfortunately now, I have had to restrict posts on my wall/timeline so that only I can view posts on my wall/timeline by others. Very unfortunate.
If someone's a spammer, he/she needs to know. Because more often than not, he/she doesn't know she's spamming. If it's a professional marketer, and/or he/she has become really persistent and annoying already, you can report his/her posts/messages or his/her profile to Facebook. By the way, you can also block certain apps and games so that you will never see any of them Farmville posts ever again.
Spam has to end, right? It probably won't, but we should try to end it. That's what I'm doing with writing this article.
You can also share this article publicly (i.e. on your wall) or your blog or podcast, such that only those interested to read it will actually read it. Don't send it as a direct link to a spammer! Or you would be spamming the spammer, and fighting fire with fire. He/she will probably never get the message, or he/she could get it all wrong.
Also, remember that spammers and spamees could co-exist in the same personality. My advice for spammers, even the unaware ones, and that means ALL OF US, is to THINK FIRST ALWAYS. Before you press "Send," or "Add Friend," or "Accept," and so on.
In short...
- You can spam in many ways thru Facebook, and most people don't want spam.
- Think first always! That includes before you press "Send," "Add Friend," and so on.
- Ask first! Because we do not know if what we're doing/sending is spam or not.
- If you do get spammed, make sure you yourself don't spam.
- Tag Facebook contacts only in photos that they are actually on. Please!!! To share a photo, use the "Share" function instead; not the Tag function. Easy to understand, right???
- Do not send unwanted/unsolicited links/messages/shares via Messages, Chat, or on the Wall/Timeline. Post it on your own wall/timeline instead. But don't tag people in that post!
- Do not invite people to groups that they do not have any interest in.
- Do not post unwanted/unrelated links/messages/shares on Group or Event Invite walls.
- Populate your Restricted and Acquaintances lists, and block apps/games you're not interested in.
- Create a new list, like "Fellow Farmvillers," and so on, and then make sure the specific app or game requests/posts are visible only to members of those lists (i.e. those interested in the same app/game).
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