Social Experiment: Can Social Network Users Kill Spam ?!?

Spam has always troubled the net. Now the question is: will spam infect social networks as well?

Let’s consider StumbleUpon, one of the most popular reccomendation systems out there today.

How could malicious users take advantage of it in order to spread their message?

Here are some ideas:

- Sending private messages to users

- Thumbing up sites they want to advertise

- Camouflaging sites to diffuse them (how? Using a cool title, writing a winning - yet fake - review and so on)

- Choosing tags (even though not related to the site) that can attract large audiences

So, when a user makes a tag-search, he will obtain spam in his/her results. But we don’t want that to happen, right?

The peculiarity of networking 2.0 is its being “social“. Users should thus be able to compete with spammers and eventually win them.

Does Stumble give this chance to users?

Are you interested in finding this out with us? (don’t worry: it’s legal ^_^ )

How?

Read on…

EXPERIMENT: Can Social Networks Kill Spam ?!?

I simulated to be a spammer (don’t worry: i’m not a real spammer).
I have created a link that we’ll consider a “spam-link“. It links to a page which main topic is “red apple”. As a spammer, I’ll try to diffuse everywhere this page (in this case…only in StumbleUpon).

What can I do with Stumble?
First I add it to my favorite sites (clicking on )
Then I review this page (if my goal is to advertise this site, I’ll write something good)
and I use cool tags (to appear in users searches). Those tags might not reflect the main topic of the site. In fact I’ll use them just to advertise my spam-page.

So, now if a user searches these tags he will probably obtain my page as a result. But he probably won’t like it because it’s a fake spam page.

In this situation I (aka “the spammer”) would achieve my aim!

But what happens if users start to be active?
How?
Each user can tag each page as he wants, using keywords that really reflect site topic. This is what we ask you to do.

If many users do so (hopefully) the tags used by the spammer should lose their relevance and the page should re-gain relevant tags.

By doing so, we as a community should be able to neutralize the spamming.

But we still have no evidence of this, we therefore would like to test it with you: the more users will participate the more precise this experiment will be.

So, if you are interested in discovering if WE can REALLY kill spam, click here and tag that page in a correct way.

Have fun!