Is Spamming Social Networking Sites Illegal?

Okay, I just came across a thread about facebook contacting someone with their attorneys and how they were told to stop doing whatever they were doing. Although they did not say what they were told to stop doing, or had done wrong, I did see a reply with a link of someone who lost a case vs facebook for 711,000,000 for spamming and phishing.

I used to make fan pages on facebook on various different accounts, and would promote different things this way, but stopped doing this months ago. Now I stick to posting on youtube videos. Is this considered illegal? I read the NON Spam Act and I didn't see anything that had to do with spamming Social Networking Sites, but I wanted to make sure.

Can someone please explain this to me?

Also, is email spamming considered illegal? I know botnets that send out emails, or cause pop ups are. But, if you have a list of say 1 million emails, and you email all of them 1 thing, is that illegal?

I'm more so wondering about the Social Network spamming though. Although there's no way it's illegal leaving comments, spamming people.

Email spamming, depends where you live, but if you're north american, very illegal.

Spamming Social Networks, not illegal as far as I know, but that doesn't protect you from civil suits as far as I know. If you draw enough attention to yourself you could still be sued by the network, as appears to be the case with some of the big cases that have hit the news.

I'm no law expert though.

dirtbag said:

Email spamming, depends where you live, but if you're north american, very illegal.

Spamming Social Networks, not illegal as far as I know, but that doesn't protect you from civil suits as far as I know. If you draw enough attention to yourself you could still be sued by the network, as appears to be the case with some of the big cases that have hit the news.

I'm no law expert though.

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What would they sue you for? I just don't understand how they could prosecute you for promoting a website, or so on? Not really sure how a civil suit could be filed either?

I just opened a Yahoo Answers question explaining in detail about how I posted my website URL with some info about it on some videos, and basically all of the people ripped me apart. They were more so just calling me a spammer and saying how that's not what they want to see. I didn't really get a straight forward answer about the legalities for this situation though. Some said that you could face a civil lawsuit, for damages and then others were saying how breaking their ToS is breaking the law, although I didn't think that in this case legal action could be pursued for breaking the ToS.

I really hope someone can clear this up for me.

Here's the answer I got on Answers: