You may not have actually seen this for yourself, but news reports today are flooding in about a suspected Facebook hack or exploit that has enabled some people to inundate the popular social networking site with offensive and graphic images as well as videos. It is alleged that the images are being distributed ‘virally’ as part of some kind of spam application that spreads across individual’s social networks when they click certain links.

Apparently this has so enraged some users that they have deleted their accounts and left the site completely. As Facebook faces increased pressure from competitors such as Google+ this has to be a worrying trend. Official responses from the company so far say that they are investigating and addressing the reports but there has been no indication that the source of the problem has been identified, neither has there been any assurance that hack has been fixed and the exploit closed. Is it possible a whole bunch of people discovered how to hack a facebook account at once? Or is this the work of one malicious individual hacker?

Part of the appeal of Facebook is how safe it is for users to browse no matter their age or personal beliefs – if this kind of material continues to pop up on the site and dramatically affect their user’s quality of experience it could become a massive problem for the site. Once user bases start moving away from a site it can be a very difficult trend to reverse – Myspace anyone?