Many of those are spam accounts. A very large number of ‘members’ have profile set in either Africa, Arabic countries or Pakistan, and most of them seem to be fake accounts.
They typically have no or few interests in common with flesh-and-blood EAs
Their profiles will show little activity, except for frequent changes of profile picture.
Their profile pictures will frequently not depict the same person.
If they post statuses, they will be extremely generic, feel-good statuses with little personalisation.
They will be a member of many many facebook groups.
Often their profile contains no english language content.
They never comment in the group, except to occasionally try to sell sunglasses.
They have 0 mutual friends, and 0 friends in the group.
Ah, that’s interesting, and important as I’ve often heard people cite the Facebook group as evidence of EA’s growth. Do you have a rough sense of how many of them are spam accounts? How many of them actually try spamming? I make a point of staying off Facebook for long periods, but I never noticed a period in which there was a lot of spam—but perhaps this is a sign that there was more moderation going on than I noticed. Is frequent spam the reason we’ve switched to requiring FB posts to go through pre-moderation before appearing?
Do you have a rough sense of how many of them are spam accounts?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any tool that would allow us to easily judge this; FB doesn’t make it easy to look at the properties of your group’s members. I would guess over half. Most of them are not active—if one posts spam, and I’m on my laptop, I’ll block them from the group—unfortunately this option is not available on my phone. Similarly, maybe 50% of all posts to the group are spam of some kind.
Is frequent spam the reason we’ve switched to requiring FB posts to go through pre-moderation before appearing?
Interesting, though you’d expect most users to not be active. When you say 50% of posts are spam, do you mean they’re “I’m a spambot selling viagra” posts, or “I’m a real person who came across EA and used this group to promote my tangentially related cause/group/etc.”?
Many of those are spam accounts. A very large number of ‘members’ have profile set in either Africa, Arabic countries or Pakistan, and most of them seem to be fake accounts.
They typically have no or few interests in common with flesh-and-blood EAs
Their profiles will show little activity, except for frequent changes of profile picture.
Their profile pictures will frequently not depict the same person.
If they post statuses, they will be extremely generic, feel-good statuses with little personalisation.
They will be a member of many many facebook groups.
Often their profile contains no english language content.
They never comment in the group, except to occasionally try to sell sunglasses.
They have 0 mutual friends, and 0 friends in the group.
Ah, that’s interesting, and important as I’ve often heard people cite the Facebook group as evidence of EA’s growth. Do you have a rough sense of how many of them are spam accounts? How many of them actually try spamming? I make a point of staying off Facebook for long periods, but I never noticed a period in which there was a lot of spam—but perhaps this is a sign that there was more moderation going on than I noticed. Is frequent spam the reason we’ve switched to requiring FB posts to go through pre-moderation before appearing?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any tool that would allow us to easily judge this; FB doesn’t make it easy to look at the properties of your group’s members. I would guess over half. Most of them are not active—if one posts spam, and I’m on my laptop, I’ll block them from the group—unfortunately this option is not available on my phone. Similarly, maybe 50% of all posts to the group are spam of some kind.
Yes
Interesting, though you’d expect most users to not be active. When you say 50% of posts are spam, do you mean they’re “I’m a spambot selling viagra” posts, or “I’m a real person who came across EA and used this group to promote my tangentially related cause/group/etc.”?
Mainly product adverts—tends to be sunglasses rather than viagra though.