Today Facebook reported they’ve been awarded $711 million in damages by a San Jose, CA court against Sanford Wallace, the notorious “Spam King” that MySpace also successfully went after last year to the tune of a $234 million judgment.

That’s some serious cash. Of course, they don’t expect to see that kind of money from Mr. Wallace (probably a case of not being able to get blood from a stone). All Facebook needs to do is to continue to send the message that they are not going to roll over and play dead when the spammers come to town. I say good for them and I hope they keep at it.

Facebook’s blog tells the rest of the story because this is not the first time this has happened.

This isn’t the first time we’ve gone to court to battle spam. Last November, we also told you about our first victory—an $873 million judgment made against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital for sending sleazy messages to people on Facebook. This was the largest judgment ever for an action brought under CAN-SPAM. We continue to work on collecting as much as possible from Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue (likely far less than the full amount) and have hired a firm to help with this. We’re hopeful that this kind of persistent pressure will act as a deterrent against those attempting to trick and annoy people on Facebook.

At the end of their post the Facebook team states that they will “continue to bring spammers to justice.” While I understand the desire to clean things up this image of a Facebook super hero approach to the spam issue is too much for even the most zealous Facebook supporter to not chuckle at. But hey, it sure beats them rolling over and just allowing their product to get all junked up. Keep it up, Facebook.

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Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you. You nailed it!

All kidding aside, this is a nice step taken by Twitter to combat an issue that many feel is getting out of hand at a very rapid pace. Of course, this is also a necessary step because the last thing Twitter needs is to be more noise than information (especially if you are speaking to some pretty big names about your feeds).

So join Twitter in making the regal Land of Tweets clean of spam. Consider this your way to make Twitter “Go green” by ridding itself of excess stuff. If nothing else you will have contributed to the betterment of your corner of the social media world.

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