Question

Facebook Wall updates now have the dropdown for users to “Unmark as a top story”, “Hide story”, “Report story or spam”, etc. Can we invoke these operations programmatically? I’m wondering if we can execute a POST operation to set is_hidden or whatever properties are associated with being a top_story, reported, etc. I don’t want to go so far as to allow for programmatic Unsubscribe. And I don’t mind a confirmation from Facebook when we try to issue these commands. The idea is to eliminate junk from a user’s wall, not to remove anything they actually might want to see. Thanks!

Answer 1

Reporting spam is not available through the Graph API. Facebook’s API documentation for Posts (the stories that appear on a user’s news feed) does include a Delete operation (that can be used to remove posts), but it states:

You can delete a post as long as your application created the post.

I believe that Facebook assumes that users will manually hide posts that they do not want to see. Since Facebook has some sort of algorithm to determine which posts are displayed, it does not really make sense for them to degrade its performance by allowing third-party applications to automatically remove posts from users’ walls (not to mention the potential for abuse).