Facebook threatens USocial with legal action over paid friends
USocial has been offering Facebook friends for sale for a couple of months now. But it hasn’t taken long for Facebook to threaten legal action, sending a cease and desist to the company. And it looks as though USocial has paid attention to the warning.
USocial is a company specializing in buying and selling social networking commodities. In essence, they act as a go-between for people looking to buy votes, friends, and followers and those happy to abandon their morals and sell these for a fast buck.
Using USocial you can buy votes on social media sites such as Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Propeller, and StumbleUpon. In July the company also started selling followers on Twitter, closely followed by friends on Facebook in September.
The whole idea of friendship as a commodity to be bartered and traded over is pretty garish to say the least. Forget love, affection, mutual closeness, and live your life purely seeking capitalist gains. Everything is for sale, even a friend.
USocial began offering Facebook friends for sale in September. One thousand Facebook friends would set you back $177.30 while 5,000 could cost $654.30. So it was never a service intended for the casual Internet user, at least not those with shallow pockets.
Facebook’s ToS clearly prohibit the use of “personal profiles for commercial gain,” and BBC News is reporting that the social networking site threatened USocial with legal action for breaking this rule. It also accused USocial of “sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.”
USocial has defended itself against the allegations of wrongdoing but has also taken steps to try and avoid getting sued. It has posted a note on the site informing users it isn’t affiliated with Facebook, promised to delete the login information it has collected, and stop selling Facebook friends.
However, it has also noted it could start offering the service again in the future although it will inform Facebook of its intention to do so. Which clearly makes the practice OK after all. Don’t set the lawyers on us, we told you what we had planned.
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