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Protecting Social Networks from Spammers
Zahid Torres-Rahman
Member since:
1 year 33 weeks
1 year 33 weeks
Last activity:
29 weeks 2 days
29 weeks 2 days
Protecting Social Networks from Spammers
Posted Fri, 22/05/2009 - 11:09
About a year ago, I set up the social network Business Fights Poverty (http://www.businessfightspoverty.org). As it heads towards 5,000 members, I am excited by the huge potential of what we can achieve by bringing so many bright minds together. But one unexpected side-effect in our growth has been the rise in spamming, which has driven the percentage of members we have had to ban to just over 1 per cent.
In her excellent article, Sarah Perez, here on The Moderator Community (http://snipurl.com/ijket), explains why this is a huge issue for all those committed to fulfilling the potential of their social networks: "Out of those surveyed, two-thirds of respondents said they would consider switching social networks if the spam level became too frequent".
We regularly check our network throughout the day, but even so spammers can do a lot of damage between our physical checks. I have been amazed at the ingenuity of the spammers, and at the fact that there are actually people in the world who derive satisfaction from doing this sort of thing.
We have been hit by fake users who cut and paste blogs from elsewhere, and end their article with a link to cheap loans, get-rich-quick-schemes, and worse. Or they simply post their ads right on the site. One particularly desperate user, who always goes by the name of Jennifer, seems intent on posting love messages to other users.
A simple solution would be to restrict access to the network to members only and to moderate who can join, or to moderate blogs before they are posted. However, my personal view is that to really achieve the objectives of our social network, it should be as open as possible. We have opted instead for clear values that prohibit spamming, and that we have tightened up over time: http://snipurl.com/ijl6e
That leads me to my question: does anyone know of any technology that can act as a spam filter on social networks (I use the Ning platform). I don't want anything obtrusive like "Bad Behaviour" (http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us) - that says how many incidents of bad behaviour it has blocked that day. I just want to stop Jennifer and her friends undermining what I and other community moderators are trying to achieve.
Any advice would be much appreciated!
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The dilema of being an open network...
Hi Zahid,
The issue you describe is prolific not only in social networks or groups but in blogs, wiki's and any commenting sites. The spammers will keep recreating profiles using different or new email addresses and keep their screen names as 'Jennifer' in your instance.
In my recent trip to the United States I met with a company who is trying to tackle this issue. They are called Rapleaf (www.rapleaf.com). They've received a lot of criticism because they scrape and access public data of people, syndicate it and then offer various services - monetizing. In saying this, one example they gave was American Express handing over a database of 100,000 and asking Rapleaf to validate or provide a rating for the names. The results enable companies to segment this data and communicate accordingly. This then lead me to think... what if social networks could use this service (through an API it's free for the first x thousand email addresses every month) and validate every registering members. This would allow either the Social Network or Community owner to run their own checks before letting these people participate in their sites.
There is no quick fix at the moment that I am aware of other than good, consistent moderation and in parallel activating access settings.
Unfortunately many communities do close their sites and maintain strict controls to keep the spammers out.
It's all a question of time until a solution presents itself.
Securing communications for social networking providers
This is a good report I found. Has anyone had experience of using Cloudmark? http://snipurl.com/ilywr
Stopping Spam Before It Starts: An update from Ning
Here's an interesting article from the Ning blog about their new systems for blocking spammers: http://blog.ning.com/2010/02/stopping-spammers-before-they-can-start.html
Manually approving all members
Hi Zahid,
Great to see that Ning has a team dedicated to devizing solutions to stop spam. It's such a nusance! Since your original post, we also had spam issues here in The Moderator Community and considering our tight knit community, it was embarrasing for members to receive strange friend requests and messages containing spam. So we implemented a solution where we approve every member before they start messaging and connecting to people. Unfortunately it does require on-going consistent moderation and it's not a viable solution for a community that has high numbers of new members joining.
:-) Maria