Spam filters are nothing new. All the platforms have them but spam still gets through, purely because the system sometimes can’t distinguish between wanted and unwanted messages.  Facebook has the advantage of already knowing who your friends are and quietly filters out the spam, sometimes also including in that filtering process messages that you might like to see.

Last week Facebook started testing a new type of filter.  What appeared was the chance to send a message directly into Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox (see screen print below) for $100 or be filtered into his ‘other folder’ for free. This is the spam filtering that facebook is testing, where for a fee, messages will be sent directly into inboxes rather than be filtered out.

A spokesperson from Facebook explained that the company is “testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.” Messages to inboxes of most users will start at $1. This is an attempt to impose a financial penalty onto spammers, making it increasingly unviable to use spam tactics on users. This may prove to be the best filter of them all.

The testing is part of a much broader update to Facebook’s messaging services, which brings together messages, emails, texts and chat into a single stream with the new spam filtering tests as an integral part of achieving a fully integrated communications package.