Facebook has revealed a little bit of information about how it looks at spam. The company says it wants to be more transparent about how it handles it.

Along with this transparency is a new message explaining why content might be blocked. It looks something like this:

"With billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook every month and bad actors constantly targeting the people who use Facebook, preventing spam isn’t easy," says Caroline Ghiossi, an associate on Facebook’s user operations team. "Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime, we rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don’t know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website."

"Using information from your reports and what we know about how the average person uses Facebook, we’ve identified certain common patterns of unacceptable behavior," adds Ghiossi. "For example, we’ve learned that if someone sends the same message to 50 people not on his or her friend list in the span of an hour, it’s usually spam. Similarly, if 75 percent of the friend requests a person sends are ignored, it’s very likely that that person is annoying others he or she doesn’t actually know."

The company notes that it can’t be too transparent in how its spam detection system works. This is obviously because spammers would simply take advantage of it. However, more details can be found in this post from Ghiossi.