Facebook Spam – The Dark Side of Web 2.0

Welcome to the dark side of Web 2.0. Facebook spam is becoming more prevalent, and the Facebook team doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

In the marketplace, you’ve got offers for MLMs targeted to students. Get rich quick schemes, nigerian schemes, etc. — all of it seems to be done through either hacked accounts or students who are paid to post them. Worse than that, it seems to take away from the businesses who do post ads legitimately.

In apps bulliten boards, since they work across networks, you end up seeing a lot of people advertising other apps. And now apps are starting to pop up that exist solely to get people to sign up for the ‘free stuff’ — Punch the Monkey for web 2.0?

Clicking on the ‘report’ link results in nothing happening — the ads are still there, and the same obviously hacked account (I doubt a cute college chick from a conservative university is going to be posting ads daily for russian mail-order brides…) is still posting spam to the marketplace.

Facebook’s security model is genius. But they’re seriously falling down now that they’ve opened up the site so that it needs moderation.