The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted.
It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need to clean up their acts.
It does actually work to ask to be put on the do not call list maintained by the caller (not the national registry), even for scammers. Nobody wants to waste resources.
1) there's little way of figureing out who is actually contacting you.
2) If you file the number with the FCC you don't get a response.
3) it's not always obvious there's a commercial entity on the other side. I've gotten a number of calls that appear to try and keep me on the line while preventing from Turing test esque conversation from taking place.
4) some of the spam is legal--technically they aren't for profit, but they serve as a funnel for commercial services. These have been the most persistent with me.
Usually, I report about 5-10 numbers a day.
And since they hang up when reaching my machine - definitely spam.
Have an app that allows you to report a phone call quickly, automatically recording and uploading the entire call (it should record all calls and delete recordings after a few hours if not reported). Then for numbers that have been reported by multiple people, have someone investigate, and if the source is located, file lawsuits.
It's $500 per violation, so if there's enough people lawsuits can work, and the company making the app can reduce investigation costs by distributing it among many different complainers (so even if a private investigator costs several thousand to get contact info, if they called 100 people and they end up getting a 50k judgement it works out).
So, effectively, this kind of thing is legal.
Mine as well. I even get fake vocal messages on my voicemail, starting with a first name I might or might not know asking me to call back like it's an emergency and obviously the number is a premium-rate one. I was like wow, that's a whole new level of spamming. I can't imagine the future of spamming : data mining personnal infos on social media + customized fake messages just to make you call back a number.
The only downside is that google voice smells like the kind of service that google doesn't regard as a needle mover and it's probably a question of when it gets axed, not if.
On the contrary, Facebook is the last halo of peace for me. I only talk to my friends, never get unwarranted messages, spam, mail subscriptions, renewals, ads, scary calls/emails, ... you name it. Now if I could email via Facebook, that would be awesome.
Regardless of how infuriated you may be by the behavior of other users, please don't resort to name-calling.
People have bought fake traffic, users and comments for that amount of time too. Often en mass with automated systems importing it from third parties like Yahoo Answers.
It's just that the commercial social networks are now the main target, and the scale of these operations has gone up accordingly.
I'm curious because I've seen the same posts in different places and now see a ton of comments boiling down to "Source?" again. The later used to be everywhere 8-9 years ago, but were typically people that actually wanted a source to read not just spam the question. Now it seems they are spamming it to distract from the real conversations.
While social media at least has "block" and "report". And the collaborative API-driven blocklists used against organised troll attacks.
Even USENET has a better killfile than my landline.