As our relationship with the Internet continues to develop, we’re seeing new and more innovative tactics employed by spammers. This is, in part, a natural reaction to the effectiveness of e-mail filtering, which makes it much more difficult for spammers to even get their messages in front of Internet users to begin with. As a result, spammers have had to get more creative.
Today, our e-mail inboxes continue to be bombarded with spam. However, you rarely come into contact with these message due to anti-spam platforms from MailCleaner and similar companies. In recent years, spammers have turned wholeheartedly to social media platforms, where an astronomical surge in spam has been witnessed.
Why Spammers Like Social Media Platforms
We’ve already mentioned how difficult it is becoming to deliver spam by e-mail. That’s certainly one factor that is driving spammers to social media platforms, but it’s by no means the only reason. Here are a few other reasons that spam can thrive in social media channels:
- Incredible reach: spam delivered through social media channels has the power to reach millions of users – especially if it goes viral.
- No leads required: whilst email spam needs to be sent to one user at a time (or in a bulk email with each user’s address listed), social spam can simply be set to public so that all can view.
- Willingness to click: whereas email is more about sending and reading messages, social media platforms are more interactive and naturally include link-clicking, page-liking and other user inputs; this makes it a more fertile ground for spammers hoping to get you to visit a page, download a file or otherwise engage with their malicious content.
- Difficult to detect: social media platforms have a hard time filtering spam; one study found that only 15% of all social spam has a link that can be detected as spam.
Preventing Social Spam
In the future, anti-spam platforms will likely create more advanced platforms that can filter spam on social media platforms as well. Some of these will be proprietary applications run by the platforms themselves. To be fair, these measures are already in place, with Facebook, Twitter and other platforms aggressively hunting down spammy posts and removing them. However, they’re sure to grow in sophistication over time.
There are also measures that users can take to limit and deal with spam on social media sites. Facebook recommends the following:
- Check your login history for suspicious activity
- Review your recent posts to ensure they were all created by you
- Check your activity log to make sure no one is using your account without your knowledge
- Review your list of apps and games and delete any that seem suspicious
- Immediately delete any posts, photos, groups or events that you didn’t create
And of course, you should always report spam to the social media platform in question. This helps them track down spammers as well as develop new strategies that are even more effective in keeping social spam at bay.