The world’s leading social networks apart from issues related to privacy are facing another hurdle. Both Facebook and Twitter are gearing up to counter an emerging threat: ‘social’ spam. One of the oldest annoyances of Internet, this malice is building up for its second act. This new form, unlike email spam, which generally emanates from strangers, ‘social’ spam peculiarly surfaces from those in the know.

Spam-mongers find social networking sites an alluring prospective since they can easily spread false messages though an elongated chain of seemingly trusted sources. Such kind of spam messages can put the usefulness, popularity and safety of social networking itself at some risk. According to Facebook, not more than 4 percent of the total content shared or disseminated on its platform is suspected to be spam, whereas Twitter claims merely 1.5 percent of the total tweets in 2010 were ‘spammy’ in nature. But the former do concede the fact that the scale of the problem is growing faster than its overall user base.

As of now, spam hits less than half a percent of Facebook members (or close to four million people) on any given day. So how does the network deal with the problem? Typically, a group of skilled Facebook engineers get to work early in the morning to deal with spammy message that suddenly inundate the site. For example, a spam message could be: “Hey, why not check out this link for Free iPad.” Obviously, there’s nothing free on offer, but for malware, which can cause users clicking on the link to rebroadcast this annoying message to the people in their networks, unintentionally.

The monitoring team members are logged on round the clock, running a program so as to filter out the false offers. They adjust the filters as the smart spammers can modify their come-on quickly to evade them. On their part, the engineers should continuously be iterating until they are able to spot their Achilles’ heel. It’s indeed a fierce race, and their goal is always to be a step ahead in its pursuit to beat the miscreants in their sinister efforts.

Facebook had no more than four engineers in 2008 who worked on this aspect – the site integrity. Today, there is an expanded team of 30, alongside a security team of 46 plus 300 more solely focused on several user issues regarding spam and safety. In all, close to one third of the Facebook employees, including user-operations managers, lawyers, risk analysts and engineers, play a vital role in terms of fighting spam in one capacity or the other.

On its part, Twitter states that it’s soon set to have more ‘spam science’ programmers as well as a greater number of account-abuse specialists in its team. Indeed, social spam battle is acquiring a newer and sharper edge.