Comment by GreySquall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GreySquall | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed, but the fact that this problem persists raises a few questions, not limited to:

1) WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's disposal? 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them? 3) Why does FB only do sweeps annually? Why not daily?

As you might've read in the Updates section of the post, I came to the conclusion that these click/like farms, although not supported by FB, are still a pleasant surprise for FB, as FB vis-a-vis these farms TRICK unsuspecting low budget ad buyers into thinking that they're still getting something for their money.

In other words: * Big corp with multimillion dollar ad budget = we put your ad in front of your desired audience, and you get lots of quality engagement. * Those with smaller ad budgets = we put your ad in front of garbage accounts, and you get garbage engagement. It's still engagement, though, so be happy about that.

That, or (and prep your tin foil hats for this one) one of FB's business models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.

I don't know the answer to 1 or 3 because I'm not a FB insider, but I can answer #2 for you:

> 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?

All you have to do is go on Fiverr and see people advertising Facebook likes for $5. The bots like a bunch of other pages and posts to simulate "real human activity", then the sellers direct all the bots to "like" a page that their client paid them to like. Rinse and repeat.

And in order for these fake accounts not to look "too" suspicious, they have general activity like clicking on ads and other things on these accounts. Most newsfeeds of real people are not very public, so all these accounts are left with is clicking on public newsfeeds (of celebrities, etc) and clicking on ads. Boom - account is not "abandoned" anymore.

And that's all it is?

Because this guy is obviously not a click-farm customer, and Facebook is presumably not paying them to click, either. They're just spam clicking the "boosted" posts Facebook puts in front of them to seem more legitimate?

The parent is saying that these clickfarm accounts are randomly liking stuff so as to look like normal users. If a group of 10,000 accounts only like things from 5 different pages, the farming would be easy to detect.

>WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's disposal?

It might have long-term implications on their actual business, as people learn that the advertising isn't worth it but no one likes to think about that. They'd rather focus on "more important" long-term things, like VR and confined internet in second world countries.

In the short-term there is no incentive to solve the problem. Facebook has been boasting about membership usage since day one, when anyone who has experience with the ecosystem (ads or apps) knows that these fake accounts are a massive issue. But they allow Facebook to say, "1 billion people* use us every day!"

It's clear from the responses you received that it's nothing but lip service about doing something regarding fake accounts.

It's a harder problem than it seems to be as many real Facebook users behave similarly to spammers. If you take some action that affects 0.1% of users, you piss off over a million users.

Also, nobody is screaming about this, and they make money off of it, so I doubt the motivation is there.

Even though it is fraudulent, corporate customers like this because they get better KPIs to publish in their internal reports.

This is why Facebook advertising is popular; not because it is effective.

> 3) Why does FB only do sweeps annually? Why not daily?

Maybe to avoid giving a feedback cycle on their detection mechanisms?

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