Facebook appears to be controlling ‘wall spam’

On Sunday, I had an e-mail alert about someone writing on my Facebook wall–a college acquaintance with whom I hadn’t spoken in quite some time. As it turns out, I was a victim of “wall spam,” a recent phenomenon on Facebook in which automated spam posts show up on members’ message walls. It’s similar to a wave of profile spam that swept News Corp.’s MySpace a few years ago. The message in question read, “Some thinks you are special and has a hot^crush on you. Find out who it could be!! ;)” with a link to a Flash file claiming to be hosted on the imageshack.us domain. But by the time I navigated to my Facebook profile to get rid of the spammy (and possibly virus-ridden) message–within an hour or two of the notification showing up in the first place–the wall post was gone. This means one of either two things: someone else saw the message on my profile and flagged it, or Facebook is actively policing ...