Facebook is tagging spammy users and threatening you

Are you sure you know this person?
If you send a request to a stranger, it will be considered spam and your friend request will be blocked temporarily. Please only send this request if you know this user.

This is the kind of message you can now get when adding someone a bit fishy as a friend on Facebook. It’s not exactly new, as it’s been around since at least December 2010, but at least I’m discovering it right now.

I like adding some random people with pictures to my “friend” list in Facebook. Two reasons for that: decorate my friend list (yeah, usually fake accounts have really nice pictures :D) and, much more importantly, confuse Big Brother about who are my real friends. And it looks like I’m not the only one, because usually those fake accounts (actually, I call them “fake” to avoid calling them “spammy”, but maybe they’re real after all ^^) have quite a lot of real accounts in their friend list. But it also looks like Big Brother hates it when you mess up with your own friend list by adding strangers into it, so they threaten you (as mentioned at the beginning of this post) when you add a fake account as your friend.

The weird thing with that message, though, is that it’s pretty unclear about what your friend request will become if you do send it:

• Is it automatically blocked? But then how can they know if you’re not really a friend of that person?
• Is it sent normally? But then when will you get blocked? If that user doesn’t accept your request? But if this is really a fake user then they will accept your request, duh!

Nice mystery, isn’t it.

My last point will be to try and determine which factors they take into account to spot “spammy” requests: your side, the fake account’s side, or both? Apparently, both:

• They consider the fake account’s side because when you want to send a friend request to a clean account you don’t get the threat (see picture above)
• But they seem to consider your side too, because as mentioned in a comment there: “I was trying to add a person, but with two different accounts on one I also got this message on the other one I didn’t”

Looks like Big Brother will do anything they can to increase the quality of their data. Your account doesn’t really belong to you as much as they belong to them if you can’t decide by yourself who your imaginary friends are… Btw, you can add me if you want, I won’t tell anyone, I promise ^^ (even though I’d actually prefer if you’d just follow Wiki4Games’s page) And, while you’re at it, can you tell me if I’m tagged as fake too? 😀