"A Social Network Where You Can Be Too Social"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303556.html

With the social networking site, Facebook, growing to over 100 million users in the last couple of months, the site has taken some serious measures against spamming. There have been at least 64 large-scale spam attacks that have occurred on social networking sites just like Facebook within the last year. The defensive measures being taken by the company, however, are kicking legitimate members of the site off too frequently. The majority of large-scale spam attacks flood hundreds of users with identical messages--so if a user of the site were to send out a legitimate message or wall post to dozens of friends within a short time-frame, that user may be flagged by Facebook as a potential spammer. In the past week, however, Facebook has gone to extremes and skipped the flagging stage by deactivating the account of anyone whose behavior seems questionable in the slightest. The actions taken by Facebook, while a sincere gesture, has outraged some users. Their grievances are not unreasonable either, with Facebook having become such an integral part of networking and keeping in contact with people, being deactivated by the company could create major communication problems among users. While Facebook is looking into reactivating legitimate users' accounts, it has become a difficult process that begins with the deactivated user writing an explaination that states why their message was legitimate (and not spam) in the first place. Should proving your legitimacy to the makers of Facebook be something users should have to be subjected to? I don't think so. Calm down Facebook.