Yesterday I was wading through my Facebook homepage when I spied a post by one of my friends. The title had the words sexy and girl in it and, being human and curious, I clicked the link. I was then redirected to a page which sports an application entitled “FB Age Verification”. Thinking nothing much about it, I accepted and allowed the application to publish on my and my friends’ walls. after which, I never saw any age-restricted videos. I was actually puzzled. It wouldn’t have strange if i was sporting a large question mark above my head. Shrugging my shoulders, I went back to my homepage. To my huge consternation though, I read from my wall that I supposedly posted a video, the same video allegedly previously posted by my other friend, on my high school classmate’s wall! The humiliation! I didn’t want to seem like a pervert (I have my perverted moments but I don’t want to brag of it openly on any social media). I immediately tracked said classmates wall and deleted the said entry. After doing so, my husband sent me a message asking me if I had fallen victim to a spam application and I said I did. Then it dawned on me that there might be more people in my friends list that had that damned application sent to them, bearing a tempting video and my name on it. Well, I can’t track them down one by one, and besides, it’s already too late.

    Since the first unsolicited email was first sent throughout ARPANET in 1978, spams have been plaguing the internet for 32 years. In all those years it has gone from emails, to forum posts, mobile sms, and now it has even infected social networking media. Usually spam contain advertisements for different products or services, but now they even go so far as to include spywares, worms, phishing programs and who knows what else. It is also one of the biggest turn off in a forum thread, causing any thread flooded with spam to die an ignoble death. Knowing this, Facebook has declared war on spam applications and its creators. Still, there are some applications that slip through Facebook’s dragnet and continue to pester users and flood various walls with undesired content.

    Aside from flooding your walls, these applications also flood your email accounts with notices for the smallest things that have little or no importance to you, or links to “compromising pictures of you posted by a friend.” For long time netizens, it is easy to identify spam at first glance. But for those who are just emerging into the cyber world, it would be difficult to discern these nuisances from the rest of the information chaos right before their eyes. They may even perpetuate the spam without realizing what they are doing in the first place.

    Now we go to the part where we advice on how to cut down from spam. The thing is, there is no one sure fire way to protect yourself from spam whether it is from emails, sms or on your Facebook page. Knowing how to deal with spam is a combination of reading and learning what spam is from your reliable friends and from dependable internet tutorials or forums; and experiencing it first hand and avoiding other future occurrences.

    Well, so much for that. Just try and be discerning. Sometimes the video you think is cool might just be another freaking spam.

spam is best on rice, not in your mailbox