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Comment by kesor | Hacker News Reader

I have tried using Facebook Ads in Israel on several occasions, strictly targeting to a very specific demographic: Lives in Israel, knows Hebrew, knows English, Age: 18-35, Interests: various technology buzzwords.

Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew, or English, or interested in tech. Most of their profiles have thousands of friends, and everything is written in Arabic and not English/Hebrew.

For the last 4 years I tried putting small amounts of money to see if the situation has changed, and each time the result was very similar.

I didn't go and talked to Facebook support about it, since that would be a waste of my time imho, and not do any good. The support engineers with canned responses most probably cannot do anything to change the situation, or even if they have ideas for improvement those would be drowned in the huge FB ocean of outsourced employees.

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Part and parcel of me writing this post was to speak up about this on behalf of other folks who seemed to have experienced the same exact issue of wasting their own ad money trying to increase visibility through Facebook.

FB makes reaching out to their support a pain in the ass. Since I was somehow able to get in touch with someone, and I collected what I felt was decent evidence that this is happening, and I was actually able to show that evidence to them, I figured it'd be worth putting something online as an additional warning to others not to bother advertising on FB, and, more importantly, speak up and call FB out on this mess.

>Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew //

Isn't that fraud on behalf of Facebook. You're paying them to present the ads to people who have characteristic A, but they instead show them to other people and charge you as if they'd done what you asked? Or are all those people saying in their profiles that they speak Hebrew? [Which makes it just people lying and not fraud at all].

Maybe FB thinks they speak Hebrew because they liked lots of other Hebrew language posts too. Could be a vicious cycle. These like-trigger-happy Arabs probably drown out the real Israelis simply because they like more posts.

Is it possible to use high friend count as a negative targeting option to weed out the fakes? Last time I looked at the FB ads interface I couldn't see it there.

Honestly I don't think that the high friend count would be a good parameter to tell fake accounts from real ones, even though the linked article seems to suggest so. There are many other comments in this thread along the same lines, let me just say that, based on my experience (e.g. my, nieces and many of their friends), it is not uncommon for teenagers in some geographical areas to have more than 3000 friends.

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