Explaining Facebook's Spam Prevention Systems

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  • As a global service connecting 400 million people, Facebook has helped build and extend communities around the world. As with any community, the benefits of bringing people together are occasionally accompanied by inappropriate or unacceptable conduct by a small number of people. This behavior ranges from thoughtless to criminal and can degrade the experience for others or undermine the community itself. 

On Facebook, the most common unacceptable behavior involves some abuse of the communication tools. This can be as innocent as annoying others with too many messages or friend requests or as serious as deliberately trying to spam others for commercial gain.


Facebook has taken these deliberate spam attacks seriously and devote a tremendous amount of their engineering time and talent to build systems that detect suspicious activity and automatically warn people about inappropriate behavior or links. Because of the efforts, only a very small percentage of people who use Facebook has ever experienced spam or a security issue.


Every once in a while, though, people misunderstand one of these systems. They incorrectly believe that Facebook is restricting them by blocking them from posting a specific link or from sending a message to someone who is not a friend. Over the years, these misunderstandings have caused Facebook to be wrongly accused of issues ranging from stifling criticism of director Roman Polanski over his sexual abuse charges to curbing support for ending U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba to blocking opponents of same-sex marriage. 


To try to be more transparent, they have been working to improve  warnings and make them more clear. 

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                                    New warning explaining why content has been blocked.
                    
                    
                    With billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook every month and bad actors constantly targeting the people who use Facebook, preventing spam isn't easy. Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime,Facebook rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don't know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website.
                    

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                            Using information from your reports and what they know about how the average person uses Facebook, they have identified certain common patterns of unacceptable behavior. For example, they have learned that if someone sends the same message to 50 people not on his or her friend list in the span of an hour, it's usually spam. Similarly, if 75 percent of the friend requests a person sends are ignored, it's very likely that that person is annoying others he or she doesn't actually know. 

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                              In extreme cases where the behavior continues despite the warnings, they may disable the person's account. When this happens, it usually isn't a person's account at all but a fake account or a real account that's been compromised. The compromised accounts are put into a process to give control back to the rightful owner. 

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                                  These automated systems don't just prevent spam and other annoyances. They also protect 

                        against dangerous websites that damage your computer or try to steal your information. When we're notified about one of these sites, we immediately add it to a block list and prevent Wall posts or messages that link to it. We also provide the person who's attempting to share the link with an explanation of why it's blocked and a way to correct us if we're wrong. 

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                • • • • • • • Sometimes, spammers try to hide their malicious links behind URL shorteners like Tiny URL or bit.ly, and in rare cases, we may temporarily block all use of a specific shortener. If you hit a block while using a URL shortener, try a different one or just use the original URL for whatever you're trying to share.
                              
                              These systems are so effective at working in the background that most people who use Facebook will never encounter one. They're not perfect, though, and Facebook always is working to improve them. 

                        
                        

                        
                        

                        If you do encounter one of our spam prevention systems, remember that its sole intent is to protect you and maintain Facebook's trusted environment.
                        

                        
                        

                        Source: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403200567130

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