UNDATED (CNN) -- It's one of the internet's oldest pests and now spammers are targeting two of the most popular social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are waging war on "social spam."
In November 2011, 70 percent of all email was spam. The good news is, that was down from more than 92 percent in August 2010. But here's the bad news. Spammers are moving to a new target: social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
According to the Wall Street Journal, spammers hit 4 million Facebook users a day. But Facebook is fighting back. Each day the site blocks 200 million malicious actions, such as links to malware.
As for Twitter, 1 and a half percent of all tweets in 2010 were spam content. So, what are the two social network giants doing to block the spam? Facebook has a team of 30 workers who spend hours combing the site for user-reported spam. It also has become stricter on user identity and has made it harder for hackers to create fake profiles.
Twitter, on the other hand, has only two programmers fighting spam, but it plans to add five more by the end of the year. The site also aims to have nine account abuse specialists.
So far Twitter's attempts to lower the amount of "spammy" tweets have been successful. Its rate of one and a half percent in 2010 was a far cry from the 10 percent in 2009.
But Facebook may be facing an uphill fight. With more than 800 million users, preventing spam may be difficult, but the company says it is determined to detect it.