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I happen to know a bit about what's going on.
I've worked on Facebook apps before. They have deliberate metrics in place to detect the spamminess of their apps and punish those accordingly. When you get invites from a facebook app, you can click the "x" next to the notification; facebook will ask you whether or not to report spam. Based on these results, facebook actually assigns a "spamminess" rating to each app, and restricts the privileges of the app based on the spamminess rating. For example, if the app has a shitty spamminess rating (even if only 3-5% of invitees mark it as spam), you won't be able to invite many people to use it (at most like 1/day or something). These metrics are VERY strict and designed to get rid of stupid "invite all your friends and get points" apps.
More recently, they've begun to crack down on spammy users as well. Essentially, there exist some algorithms that track your behaviour and attempt to guess if you're spamming. Obvious these are heuristics and are not perfect, but sometimes it's tough for them to judge what's spam and what isn't. Are you spamming if you invite all of your friends to an event you're promoting? etc.
Facebook is very easy to write bots for (you could easily write one to crawl the site and extract unprotected friend/profile information; I've seen it done in far less than a day.) It's equally easy to write bots that would PM all users in a friends list.
Bottom line... Facebook wants to prevent UNSOLICITED spam from people you've friended. If you are copy-pasting messages and PMing/wall-posting them to multiple other users, FB will likely think you're spamming and you'll suffer accordingly. Use groups/events/fan pages and message all users; people can opt-out of those.
Like any heuristics, Facebook's are not perfect and get tweaked all the time.
LOL @ getting b4nz0r3d for spamming "happy birthday" on multiple walls.
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I am nobody. Nobody is perfect. Therefore I am perfect.
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