Spammers on Facebook are making $200 mn a year: report

Italian security researchers says Facebook spammers are  raking in $200 million a year just from posting third-party links. According to an article in the Guardian, the researchers uncovered the price lists for posting third-party links to Facebook fan pages — and calculated that the most popular links are earning spammers a substantial amount. The research  was conducted by a group led by Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli. The duo had previously done an extensive report on how some prominent brands were buying followers on Twitter. You can read that report here. Phrases such as ‘Click here, “free,” “wow,” or “join,” followed by short links which then led users to sites outside Facebook. The group also looked at fan pages where spammers tend to post many such bit links. [caption id=“attachment_1072841” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AP image[/caption] The report says that spammers get paid between $13 to $58 per post depending on the number of subscribers a particular page has. While spam might seem a nuisance on Facebook, according to what spammers told the researchers, Facebook tolerates their presence on the network because they “generate content.” “Facebook doesn’t ban us, simply because we generate the content on Facebook itself. Everyday I materialise funny, and interesting content full of phrases and so forth that is shared and liked by thousands of users…” a spammer told researchers, according to the Guardian. Mashable says that Stroppa believes Facebook isn’t doing enough to fight spam problem. Facebook, however, rubbishes these claims, and told Mashable, ““Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam is a top priority for us. We have developed a number of systems to identify spam and stop it from spreading, and we have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down Pages, accounts, and applications that are found to be in violation of our terms of service. " Let us know in the comments if you think Facebook is doing enough to fight spam.