Starbucks facebook fanpage hijacked for Israel hating messages yesterday

★$ (Starbucks!) facebook page was "hacked" yesterday, or rather hijacked as Drew Benvie rightly calls it in his post about the mess. It's Drew's screendump of the ensuing twitter-worry as people saw it happening and were wondering what was going on.

Reputation online says; "This is an interesting situation. On one hand, Starbucks did well to limit the damage by responding quickly, on the other, ’social media guidelines’ say to avoid deleting posts or comments at all costs." and ponders the difficulty of managing Fan pages and the likes. Sure, one shouldn't be deleting messages without noting that one has done so, but in this case - unlike the Nestlé facebook mishap - couldn't the "Israel suck0rz" messages be seen as nothing but spam? Do brands need to alert everyone to the amount of spam they delete? In that case, I deleted twenty libido rapido and one cheap fashion shoes spam before they reached the Adland pages here today, everyone happy? Should I alert you every time I do this, or will it be enough that I tell you right now that I do this every day, including on weekends?

Drew points out the obvious pain with facebook: "Whilst some online platforms enable moderation, Facebook is one that does not. " which leaves Starbucks with a wide-open page, fanned by 7.5million people who all have rights to comment on the wall of Starbucks. Starbucks could have chosen to disable "Fans can write or post content on the wall", but as they did not, they opened up to "Fans can hijack your wall for political messages and thus reach a wider audience, namely yours". There is no "moderated posting by fans to wall" setting option provided by facebook. Fanning (or as it is now known, liking) any major popular brand allows anyone to use that brand's platform as a megaphone for their own message. Carefully managed brands might want to reconsider that facebook fan page, or they might find themselves, like Starbucks, hating on Israel.