What You Can Do Against Social Media Spam

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the social media accounts of many media companies have been flooded with propaganda comments. The Frankfurter Rundschau even complains that Russian sympathizers and bots break the deletion limit on Facebook with more than 10,000 comments per day.

The problem of social spam is neither new nor limited to media companies. Other organizations and companies are also confronted with unwanted comments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Sometimes it’s just advertising or an attempt to gain followers for your own account.

Nevertheless, spam can massively impede the exchange in one’s own community and damage an organization’s image. Luckily, social media managers are not powerless.

In this article, we deal with

how to recognize spam on social media,
what you can do about it and
why your social media infrastructure is crucial in the fight against spam.

Different Types of Social Spam – Overview

Various phenomena can be summarized under the generic term social media spam or social spam.

The following are particularly relevant for companies and organizations:

Unwanted advertising: Almost as old as social media itself are comments that have only one purpose: to gain new followers for your own account or to increase your own sales.
Propaganda: The media and political organizations in particular are confronted with propaganda bots that spread fake news. These are often fake accounts that get involved in discussions and share misinformation or rumors. A recent example of this is the #IStandWithPutin campaign on Twitter.
Malicious links: Sometimes spam comments on social media contain links that lead to malicious or spam websites.
Trolls: The primary goal of trolls is to create discord with mass mailings. The line between propaganda bots and trolls is often blurred.

Fake accounts operated by bots play a central role in social spam. Because they camouflage themselves more and more cleverly, they are sometimes difficult to identify as such.

The role of social spam on different platforms

In the past, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp were particularly affected by fake news.

The problem of fake accounts is particularly big on Twitter. The dimension fluctuates depending on political events. An American study came to the conclusion that between 45 and 60 percent of the Twitter accounts that discussed the corona crisis were operated by bots.

Such numbers are disputed. But one thing is certain: fake accounts have a significant impact on discussions on Twitter.

How to recognize social spam: tips

If you manage a large social media community, you need to find out quickly whether a commenter is trying to make a constructive contribution or is doing something dishonest.

You can use these signs of spam as a guide:

Users refer to their own account, their website, or their online shop. In this case, there is a high chance that they are only here to collect followers or customers.
Comments consist solely of nondescript approval.
Users spread untruths or refuted claims. Sometimes it’s just a repost or retweet.
Comments contain provocative, overzealous statements, hate speech, and abuse. There may also be bad spelling, excessive use of exclamation marks, and similar stylistic abnormalities.
Unnatural language can indicate a bot.

But beware: that it is a troll and not a dissatisfied customer sometimes only becomes apparent as the conversation progresses.

And what about fake accounts?

Here you can use the following properties as a guide:

The account hardly posts anything about his private life, but always something about political issues.
He publishes nothing or almost nothing and only comments on other people’s posts.
The posts consist exclusively or almost exclusively of reposts.
Extremely many posts are conspicuously compared to few friends or followers.
Articles are in different languages and/or read like a machine translation.
Photos show discrepancies on closer inspection.

Good to know

Photos of attractive women between the ages of 20 and 30 are particularly popular for fake accounts.

Tip

You can train your ability to recognize fake accounts in a playful way. The online game Spot the Troll does not make it easy for you and is therefore a valuable support.

Respond appropriately to social media spam

Why you shouldn’t just ignore social spam?

Bots and trolls can cause serious damage to businesses and organizations. They can have a negative impact on the company’s image:

There is a risk that social spam will end in a shitstorm.
The reputation of your company or organization can suffer, not only through propaganda statements but also through spammed accounts.
Fake news like the ones spread by social bots can influence political sentiment. On the one hand, they can help individuals and groups become radicalized or at least remain trapped in their own echo chambers. Since Brexit at the latest, discussions about the extent to which social spam influences political decisions have also increased.

So responding to social spam is important for a number of reasons. Use the following steps as a guide:

Develop guidelines: Formulate clear framework conditions for communication in your community. This allows you to refer to your guidelines when you ban someone from your community or delete comments.
Filter out early: You can delete or hide some comments based on your guidelines at an early stage, for example, if they contain obviously untrue statements or wild insults.
Correcting: Especially if you are unsure whether it is a bot or troll, it can make sense to correct false claims. The community often does this job for you. It is important that you do not get involved in long discussions.
Delete: In the case of mass spam attacks, you cannot avoid large-scale hiding and deletion. Obvious fake or troll accounts can be blocked.

In fact, quick deletion, hiding, and blocking are often the only way to get a handle on the large-scale bot attacks media companies are routinely exposed to. The decisive factor is that it is done efficiently and with little effort.

Important

While other community members often respond positively to deleting troll comments, complaints are different. Ignoring or deleting serious critical comments quickly leads to image damage. A quick and appropriate response is important here. Depending on whether the criticism is justified, it can also be an apology.

How the right infrastructure helps against social spam

If your team is regularly confronted with large amounts of spam, you need a good infrastructure.

A good social media tool offers you a central ticket inbox, where all notifications and comments for all your channels end up. This is how you keep track.
You can create user profiles with an integrated customer relationship management tool. This will help you to identify troublemakers or trolls.
Depending on the spam wave and the size of your social media management team, you will quickly reach your limits if you want to delete or hide every comment manually. Automation support you. For example, define keywords for comments that should be automatically hidden.
There is now a growing number of tools on the market that use artificial intelligence to identify hate comments and the like.

Social spam can be combated effectively

Social media spam is a problem that will stay with us. Even if platforms react more sensitively to this today than they did a few years ago, trolls and fake accounts can only be contained to a certain extent.

It is all the more important for organizations and companies that are often confronted with social spam to tackle the problem in a targeted manner. With a combination of well-established processes and the right infrastructure, you prevent waves of spam from having a negative impact on the exchange in your community, the image of your organization, or even the formation of political opinions.