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How to Spot Fake Friend Requests on MySpace

by Terrence O'Brien on July 23, 2007 at 12:10 PM

Seperate Real Friends from Fake on MySpaveIf you're a user of MySpace or Facebook, you've certainly had your fair share of run-ins with fake profiles built for spamming and possibly loading spyware on your PC. Its not always easy to tell the fake ones from the real people. Sure, the 'CamGrrlz' are easy to spot, but what about the regular guy who instead of messaging you to learn more about you just posts bulletins about some new great page where you can get Viagra for cheap.

Until now, no spam blocking features have been available on the social networking sites. Aaron Zinman and Judith Donath from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have however devised a system (PDF) for testing MySpace pages to determine if they're real people or not. The software looks at a profile and measures how personalized a page is, how many shared photos and video clips it has, and the frequency of sent and received messages. It then determines whether the page is social or promotional based on these factors.

So far the software has proven fairly successful, roughly matching human grades 90 per cent of the time and exactly matched them 30 to 50 per cent of the time in laboratory tests. The software may one day help you decide whether to accept a friend request or clean up social networks as they grow. The software will be shown at an anti-spam conference in August.

From New Scientist

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Tags: facebook, MIT, myspace, software, spam

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