Social Spam
Today’s society is super-connected. Physically, we have fast and efficient transportation systems that allow us to commute to our meetings. Virtually, we have ever-increasing bandwidth and improving technology which simplify communication and the ability to remain connected to one another. While Moore’s Law is still somewhat valid for computing machinery, our human brains have not been able to keep pace with all this progress. Data and information have become readily available - in fact, since the Internet boom, the problem of information-overload has become more severe and widespread.
We’re already familiar with e-mail spam: messages that we did not request for or do not want are labeled as spam. The reason for the ubiquity of spam is simply due to the convenience and low cost of generating such spam. If, for some reason, sending an e-mail cost the sender a dollar, there wouldn’t be so much spam. If sending an e-mail involved some form of computation which took a minute or two, there wouldn’t be so much spam.
Now, with nascent technologies and services like Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, and the like, another form of spam has surfaced - social spam.
Definition of Social Spam
The source or root of social spam is in social networking sites and services, or social networks. Broadly defined, social spam is simply requests or messages, which you do not want, that come from other people or entities within the social network that you use.
Causes of Social Spam
For now, there seem to be three main trends in the cause of social spam. Firstly, there are organisational entities looking to advertise a product or service for commercial reasons. Secondly, there are individuals who have a strong desire for social inclusion. Thirdly, the ease of creating custom extensions on social networks: Some may classify the first type of spam as real spam, and the second type as pseudo-spam, but the very definition of spam still holds.
Commercial Cause
Slightly more than half of all social spam is generated for commercial reasons. Companies seeking new ways to promote their wares have been attracted to social networks due to the sheer number of users that they can potentially reach. Numerous companies set up profiles in social networks and then randomly (or not) start to include real social network users in their profile. By doing so, they are able to harvest tonnes of information that immediately becomes available when a user accepts their request to be added.
Another form involves some form of deceit. The tactics described below are normally used by more dubious commercial services, such as companies providing adult entertainment services. In the case of such, these businesses generally set up profiles on social networks and pose as female users, with suggestive photographs and profile descriptions to lure unsuspecting social network users into initiating contact. While I may sound stereotypical about this, I must add that this form of social spam is not limited purely to adult entertainment. I have seen companies who create profiles that look seemingly innocuous and which appeal to users who, out of our human-nature tendency to be curious, click on these profiles, only to eventually realise that they are not real people.
The Desire for Social Inclusion
Since the advent of first generation social networks, the typical adolescent mindset has become more pervasive among Internet users. This mindset generally revolves around the need for competition and social inclusion. For instance, many find it necessary that they appear as someone who is widely-known, sociable, or influential to others. They feel that having more friends (or people) connected to their profile equates directly to being more popular. Due to this, such people generate their own social spam by sending connection requests to random people, or to people they know, but barely.
My own experience with such purveyors of social spam is that the level of inconvenience that comes with it is greater than those that generate social spam for commercial reasons. The reason for my opinion is that social spam generated by businesses and companies is generally easy to spot and remove. In contrast, when I receive a request from some person that I barely know, if at all, there are a few processes that I have to undertake before coming to a decision whether to accept that request or to reject it. First, one would have to determine whether the person requesting the connection is known to him or her. Next, that person, at least on a subconscious level, has to rate the requester according to how well he or she knows them. Finally, that person would have to make a conscious decision to accept or reject the request, which may take into consideration the social and emotional ramifications of the action.
Extensions to Social Networks
Facebook itself, like many others, allows developers to write custom applications through an easy-to-use API. This could prove to be its greatest asset and its greatest enemy at the same time. The simplicity of these APIs creates such low barriers to entry, to the point where anybody who can write simple scripts could potentially create his or her own plug-in or mini-application. While there are many useful extensions available, this has led to vast amounts of junk extensions that generally provide zero useful features. Notifications and requests, together with the ever-available “Send to All” buttons in such plug-ins generate their own fair share of social spam.
Consequences of Social Spam
Now that we’ve seen how an instance of social spam could be generated and the inconvenience one instance causes, imagine social spam on the magnitude of its e-mail cousin. The same inconveniences and economic costs involved in e-mail spam is also applicable to spam of a social nature. Time lost, revenue lost due to time lost, computing resources wasted including bandwidth and processing power, are all real consequences of social spam. Similarly, the vast amount of social spam disguises legitimate requests on the social network, which one would inadvertently disregard as spam.
I used to enjoy using services such as Facebook and Friendster. Nowadays, I have to force myself to log in at least once a week to remove social spam. I’ve stopped using them to connect to friends, and have even contemplated deleting my account. I’ve received notifications from weird-sounding mini-applications that I’ve begun to reject all requests to add any kind of new application to my profile.
Conclusion
The result and the impact of social spam in the near future remain to be seen. We can speculate all we want, and yet be wrong about it. One thing is quite certain, however, and it is that if the magnitude of social spam continues to increase, the convenience and benefits of social networking services would be overwhelmed and outweighed by the eventual inconvenience that would come with using such a service. Should that day ever come, we would, as a connected world, possibly be forced to disconnect ourselves from the first useful application of technology since the Internet and search engines.
