Fake accounts and spammers will ruin social media

Pinterest announced that last week it has begun to purge its roles of the fake accounts and spammers that made up 20% of their membership. While 20% may seem high, reports from Facebook and other sites show that to be the norm more than an exception.

This is a bigger story than people realize. Social media goes so much further than people talking…and that’s why it is taking over the enterprise as well. Especially when it goes to work with us, it has three key roles beyond the conversations it carries. Social media has these other roles:

1. Manage circles of influence (for how messages get out and into heads)
2. Determine scope of connection (for how work gets done)
3. Identity management (for making sure we know who we’re working with)

This third piece, identity management, is enormous because it determines trust. Social media offers us the best filter we could ever hope for in a world where information overload is threatening us with “filter failure” (Clay Shirky’s term from waaayyy back in 2008).

This is exactly why Facebook, Pinterest and other social media need to be very, very careful about fake and spam accounts. If not, this will be their undoing because it undermines the most important aspects of social media…identity management and trust.

Photo credit: Chris Real