[UPDATE: Who exactly is Nicole Santos? We unearth some clues!]
Were you one of the many Facebookers last night greeted by some variation of the following message on your wall? — “Fuck you faggot. Go kill yourself. Do whatever the fuck you want. I hate you and the only way to remove all these posts is by disabling this below.” If so, welcome to the new era of Facebook spam!
As Facebook gradually replaces e-mail, it’s no longer just hooker-bots, Farmville invites, and stupid quizzes filling your inbox. Now homophobic spammers want to enrage you and your friends into giving all your personal info by clicking a “disabling link.” Of course, Facebook won’t change anything on their system until they get flooded with user complaints, but if they’re not more vigilant about keeping trash like this off their network, they could easily become the next MySpace.
And who the heck is Nicole Santos anyway?
How about we take this to the next level?
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declanto
Nicole Santos…about 41 million hits via Google.
Mathew
I was unfortunate enough to have been affected by this spam. One of my friends “posted” this to my wall, and after I attempted to disable it, it posted itself on some of my friends’ walls under my name. I know most of my friends probably knew that it wasn’t really me who wrote that, but I’d hate for any of them to think that I’d deliberately post anything awful like that to their walls.
andy
I wish we could litigate against these hate speech harassments for damages.
andy
Also I don’t think saying stuff like this should be protected by “free speech”.
Cam
This is off topic, but …
Anybody notice that whenever there is a tragedy in a place like New York, all the evangellicals come out and say that it is God punishing that city because it accepts gays?
I notice that they don’t seem to be coming out saying that all the tragedies in Mississippi, and all the other states in that area may be God punishing them because of their bigotry towards gays.
Fair is Fair.
Nathan
Waking up to this really surprised me, this is totally unacceptable and facebook should be punished for allowing this, they can not have two men kissing but they can tell every gay person they should commit suicide, facebook has no idea what they are doing and should have a lawsuit with this.
Trevor
Unfortunately this happened to me, first I got the message then, I was hacked and the message was sent to my friends list, Facebook better take IMMEDIATE action to stop this. I would never use such a vulgar slur to ANYONE, or tell anyone to kill themselves, usually the spams are just annoying, but now they’re downright dangerous
Lando
@Cam: It isn’t “all” the evangelicals doing it. Just the crazy ones that the media likes to show so that the rest of them look bad. It would be like making the claim that “all” the gay men like doing that thing with the hamster…
Cam
@Lando:
But my point is…they area all over the news, and yet when the disasters strike places like Mississippi, I never hear about the news following up and contacting them saying “Well you said this about NYC, so is God now angry at Mississippi for being ANTI-Gay?
Frederick
I believe Facebook has a legal responsibility to prevent this kind of spam. It may be a little extreme to call these types of messages hate-crimes, but technically they are. Consequently, Facebook needs to intervene to stop them from occurring; otherwise, Facebook is guilty of enabling these hate-crimes to continue to occur.(Obviously,I agree with Andy-post#4-that this goes way beyond “free speech”.)
WIlliam
This is a huge problem! Totally unacceptable!
Anonymour
Facebook is homophobic. They won’t do anything about this. Face it.
sam
oh my god what’s with all the people whining?!
Facebook got HACKED. Something unexpected happened. And what did they do? They got rid of it on my pages in about five minutes, from the first message to the last. Literally. Ten minutes max.
Who the f was suggesting a lawsuit?! What kind of world do you live in? Spam is something we have to accept will happen in the digital and internet world. So long as facebook cleans it up appropriately as they did, that’s all we can expect.
james_from_cambridge
@andy: Absolutely Andy! We’ll make you the pope of free speech and let you decide what’s hate speech and what’s not. Because that’s working out so well for Europe. Fucking Christ!!!
james_from_cambridge
@Cam: That’s because God is punishing Mississippi not for accepting homosexuality but for being in-bred fuckwits who sex up their sister.
schlukitz
@Cam:
But Pat Robertson and all of the other fundie trash will be saying it, very shortly I am sure, that this is another demonstration of God’s wrath at gays.
Oddly, it’s the heterosexuals who suffered the most in all of the tragedies that we gays get blamed for.
God must have terrible aim.
“Damn. Another gutter ball” he is probably muttering to himself.
Eblerieneenen
Haha my ”friend” postt it on my wall and i was like wtf??
DJ
What works for me is to only have people I actually know on my Facebook account. So if something like that came up, I would know right away something wasn’t right and I sure wouldn’t click any links.