Ask HN: Does Facebook automatically “like” pages on your behalf? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does Facebook automatically “like” pages on your behalf?

12 pointssjroot7 comments

I have noticed this a couple of times, where I am scrolling through my News Feed and come across a post (spam, typically) from a page that does not look familiar to me. Today it was a page called "Rock Music Community."

I tapped the name and was taken to the page itself, where it showed that I had liked and followed it. This is odd considering the two facts below, which I know to be true:

1) I use a secure password and keep track of active Facebook sessions. I am certain no one else is using my account in a malicious way.

2) I know for a fact that I never went to a page named "Rock Music Community" and pressed the like button.

That said, what is the deal? It has happened 4-5 times in the past as well, with different pages. Has anyone else experienced this?

This is a wild guess, but could be the case for you seeing as the page's name was "Rock Music Community":

Many years ago, when FB went through one of their conversions of "old data" to "new data" -- your old FB profile's data was probably converted. For example if you had a FB account from its college days say in 2005, and in the "hobbies/interests" section you put "Rock music", at one point when FB converted those fields into FB page likes for you automatically, it tried to search for the closest match to "Rock music" and ended up on some random "Rock Music Community" page. I know this was the case for me for a few things and I went and unliked them manually.

Check out https://www.facebook.com/[yourfbname]/likes and see if you find more similar pages being liked by you.

I’ve noticed it through dating apps. They’ll pull your “page likes” and list them as interests. Last time around there was over a dozen I had never visited on FB let alone opt-in.

I would say it's either a rebranded page, or someone used a "clickjacker" on a website to get you to automatically like their page when you were browsing.

I've heard that if a page is banned for impersonation or copyright infringement, etc, the likes are 'transferred' to the 'real' page.

This has happened in the past to me as well, several times.

This is just a speculation, but it can be that people sell/buy facebook pages that already have many likes.

Most common reasons are: clickjacking, someone turned a profile into a page, or a page changed name.

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