Pinterest shows off its new tool for fighting spam

Spam is one of the biggest issues out there for websites, particularly user-generated content-driven ones like Pinterest. One of the company’s employees decided to seek advice from the co-founder of Instagram on how to deal with the problem and the end result was the creation of a service called Stingray that can identify and eliminate unwanted behavior in less than a second, something that took as long as a day before. 

Marty Weiner, employee Number Two at Pinterest, needed a better way to fight spam on the popular internet-scrapbooking site. At one point, he asked Mike Krieger, the co-founder of another up-and-coming online social network—Instagram—how he handled the problem. “Well,” said Krieger, whose company had recently been bought by Facebook, “we used to program these little rules to look for patterns. Then we went to Facebook, and we just plugged into their spam machine.” That’s not what Weiner wanted to hear. As he puts it: “My reaction was: ‘You bastards! That’s not fair!’” But rather than wallow in self-pity, Weiner and his colleagues went to work a new system that could identify and eliminate bogus posts from the service in real-time. Called Stingray, this service is now widely used at Pinterest, and according to Weiner—who oversees the Pinterest spam team, known as Black Ops inside the company—it can identify inappropriate and unwanted behavior in a matter of milliseconds. In the past, the company needed as much as 24 hours to identify some spam.