Facebook may be more than two decades old, but never put it past spammers to figure out new and creative ways to annoy the billions of people who use it. Over the past few weeks, online forums such as Reddit and Twitter have been teeming with rants from angry users who are facing a particularly vexing problem: Facebook tag spam. They keep getting tagged on Facebook by unfamiliar accounts, apparently with the intention of being redirected to spammy posts or tricked into clicking on suspicious links.
Some users described being tagged multiple times a day, with the issue persisting for several days in a row. We’ve counted no fewer than eight recent discussion threads on Reddit dedicated to this topic, some with several hundred comments asking how to stop getting tagged in spam on Facebook.
What’s weirder is that many of the spammy posts feature images of women breastfeeding, according to numerous threads, while others contain content described as inappropriate or even explicit.
Disturbingly, tagged posts will often appear in the newsfeeds of your Facebook friends, so users are obviously worried about their friends or relatives seeing the explicit content too.
Ryan Daniels, a spokesperson for Facebook parent Meta Platforms, told Fast Company that the Facebook tag spam problem is a known issue. “Unfortunately, spam is an industry-wide concern, and since this is an adversarial space, spammers continue to evolve their methods and shift tactics to avoid detection,” he said. “We’re aware of this issue and want our users to have a positive experience on our platforms, which is why we’re working to address it.”
Annoying notifications
On Facebook, getting tagged in a post will typically result in a notification for the tagged user, meaning people on the receiving end of these tags are seeing that little red counter pop up multiple times a day.
Spammers have apparently discovered that tagging people in posts is an ideal way to get their attention, and although this tactic is not new, the volume of it appears to have increased for many users in recent days. Some say it has gotten so bad that they have resorted to deactivating their Facebook accounts.
“I’m just tired of it,” noted one typically exasperated Reddit commenter. “I don’t understand how their posts are even being allowed in the first place.”
Why images of breastfeeding? That’s a question for the spammers, but such images may be seen by bad actors as a loophole in Facebook’s community guidelines, which restrict most types of nudity but make exceptions for photos of breastfeeding mothers.
How can I stop getting tagged in spam on Facebook?
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this whole thing is that Facebook settings don’t allow users to completely stop people from tagging them. According to the site’s help center, you can be tagged by people you’re friends with or people your friends are friends with, which is a lot of people. It’s not entirely clear how the tag spammers are able to tag so many users they’re not connected with or if they’re using some type of bot software to achieve their aims.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can wrest at least some control back from these spammers. You can, for example, turn on Facebook’s “tag review” setting. This won’t stop the tags, but it will allow you to review them. Further, you can limit the audience for posts that you’re tagged in, although they may still appear in other people’s feeds or searches. The best thing to do is remove unwanted tags the moment you become aware of them.
Hopefully, Meta will be able to clamp down on this activity sooner rather than later, so Facebook users can go back to the peace and quiet they’ve come to expect from a 20-year-old social network. That is, until spammers inevitably figure out the next feature to exploit.