Facebook – Friend Or Foe ?

by Dino Delellis

A few days ago, I wrote an article that was republished a number of times around the internet. In it I detailed a little bit of the angst being felt by people who had been banned or suspended while diddling around in the social network – Facebook.

Go ahead, say it – so what ? Granted that being suspended from facebook pales next to world hunger and global melting or is that global warming. But, if you were the cherished one expected to invite 600 wedding guests to your mother-in-laws anniversary and suddenly you got suspended after sending out only 20 invites, well you know then that being banned at such an auspicious time is going to look a little suspicious, right?

So, if you just got suspended while doing someone else a favor, and you are sitting around reading this article and wondering if your suspension might get released tomorrow. Dream on. Same for if you ignored the warning suspension messages and went direct to a facebook ban. Those invitations didn’t go out and you know you are in a pile of deep do do. Look around the front page of facebook, the address is there for dispute resolution. Get a message to them right away, but don’t hold your breath while doing this.

And let us not forget that commercial class of people feeling deep business angst over having lost their list of 3-4000 prospects. Sometimes these are the mom and pop type companies who have decided to use facebook for marketing and sometimes these are sizable mid-sized corporations getting overly aggressive with their grassroots marketing or surveying. In any case, the loss of the profile also means no contact with the prospective customer base.

In that article, I wrote a little about the facebook warning messages which I and many others consider quite bland. I detailed in vivid language that I personally felt that for such an important thing, they facebook could have done a little better in terms of bringing the urgency of the situation to their members.

Ignorance of the Law is no excuse and in the case of Facebook, a faceless engine in the background deems certain activity looks like spam according to their filters and suddenly you are out of there. But here is some detail on activities that you should NOT do, so as to stay out of trouble with Facebook.

Blatant Nudity – for you exhibitionists this is a no no Writing to too many people who are not your friends (yet). Writing too much to people who have invited you to be their friend but whom you have not yet accepted. Writing on too many walls in a short period of time – looks like spam.

Using images without permission – you are asked about this. Using facebook’s email facility as if it were IM or MSN or Yahoo chat. Odd that on a social network you can get banned for that, but there you go. Facebook has a chat facility and they would rather you use that rather than abuse the email in that way. Promotion of racism, hate mail or any of the regular sort of utterances that would have gotten you in trouble outside of facebook too. People engaging in this thing shouldn’t be surprised if their accounts are permanently suspended.

And my personal favorites: Spamming your own facebook group 3 or more times per day. After getting a warning, keep doing what you were doing prior. Sending add requests to more than two hundred people that you dont know in one day.

Generally, it would appear that there are two classes of evil that can get one banned or suspended from facebook. Nudity and stealing images and other such types of activity is one class of activity.

You can invite 500 perfect facebook strangers to be your friend but not in the same hour or day. Over two weeks or more would be perfect, but not 1 day.

Most of the above sins fall into two groups. Either blatant lack of social etiquette or a time based limit that has been exceeded. Inviting two hundred strangers to be your friend in 2 weeks is allowed, but not if done in 30 minutes. If you do run into a problem there is a resolution email on the site but the guys there are really pretty busy.