How to deal with social media spam
One of the most frustrating side-effects of the internet, email and particularly social media today is the amount of spam we receive. Find out how to deal with it.
Social media spam can be particularly irritating. While social media started as a way to connect with friends and family, it’s evolved over the years and become a valuable business tool. But that has also meant that it has attracted the attention of spammers.
From strangers requesting friendship (with questionable intentions) to businesses and MLM reps sliding into your direct messages trying to pitch to you, it can feel sometimes like you are holding back an unwanted invasion on what should be your personal profile.
How should you deal with spam on social media?
So what can you do about it? Each social network and messenger has its own ways of fighting spam. On Instagram, it depends on the type of account you hold. For business accounts, there is an alert setting that can be turned off for group add requests. You can also use helper applications. For private accounts, you can set up a private mode and set the rules for adding to groups.
But that if spammers are causing problems in other ways? Sometimes if there’s an excess of spam in comments, people can be put off following you, and you can be forced to buy Instagram followers in order to maintain your audience size. This can be particularly problematic if you make money from the size of your following.
Facebook, meanwhile, uses the report function to try to combat spam. Group admins can also set up a list of questions for candidates to join, in an attempt to keep their groups spam-free. Facebook has a Potential Spam folder too, where questionable messages are moved, so you can decide what to do with them.
In WhatsApp, you need to set up the “Privacy” section. In the latest version of the messenger app, users can choose who from their list of contacts can invite them to groups.
In Telegram, bots help to fight spam. For a small community, a simple bot moderator is enough. The application helps to moderate the activity of new members of the group: temporarily prohibit the addition of pictures and restrict the sending of messages by timing. Large groups will have to use large bots with captcha checking tools and other means of fighting spam.
By taking actions like these above you can help to keep your social media platforms as spam-free as possible, and hopefully reduce the need to buy real Instagram followers to try to recover lost followers.
How can you help fight spam?
Fighting spam is an everyday task for large companies and users of various services. To help social networks get rid of annoying advertisements and messages from scammers, you can track their activity in your account and report them. If you see comments that are not relevant to the topic of your post and your profile in general, then mark them as spam.
Also, don’t forget about other users as well. If you notice attacks on other accounts, you can also report these and mark as spam. It only takes a moment and helps social media networks to recognise and ban unwanted accounts faster. Here’s how to report spam on:
We can all play a role in keeping the social media platforms we love safe and spam-free… or at least help get rid of some of it!
