Facebook Subscribe exposes journalists to spam, pornography

When the Travel Channel's Nisha Chittal launched her public profile on Facebook Subscribe, she looked forward to connecting with a community that shared her wanderlust and passion for social media.

Instead, she got sexually explicit messages, pornographic photos, and spammy, irrelevant messages from thousands of users around the world.

"It was coming at such a high volume - I was seeing messages every few minutes from these random men," Chittal said. "For every one or two legitimate comments, I would get 20 from creepy men who would say weird or strange or sexual things."

Chittal is just one of many journalists who has enabled Facebook's Subscribe feature only to be shocked, disturbed or disappointed by the results.

Subscribe enables Facebook users to turn portions of their private profiles into public pages and allows others to follow those pages to see their updates. In many ways, it is Facebook's answer to Twitter - a way for users to interact with each other and crowdsource information without having to become "friends."

The feature, which debuted in September, now has thousands of users, including many journalists who may not be household names but already boast impressive followings. Chittal has amassed over 80,000 subscribers on Facebook in less than six months - in stark contrast to her Twitter presence, where it has taken her three years to build up roughly 5,000 followers.

But some journalists say their high subscriber counts are effectively useless, since the majority seem to be users who are not interested in the content they're providing and simply post gibberish or sexual harassment.

"Some of them have really graphic, pornographic profile pictures," Chittal said. "I don't want to look at my subscriber list and see porn everywhere."

Bloomberg producer Anne Torres was excited to share her work both as a journalist and amateur photographer with a global audience, but when she looked at her subscriber list she was shocked. "I was so offended I wanted to shut down my Facebook right away," she said. "There are really a lot of explicit photos…It's porn."

"My public FB posts are almost always slammed with spammy comments," another editor wrote in a Facebook group for Social Journalism. "It's freaking out my Facebook friends (and family)."

For now, Torres and Chittal have both shut down their public walls so that strangers can no longer leave or send them messages anymore - effectively defeating the purpose of Subscribe.