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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why?

Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught.

A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistication than most companies have. And are they really going to pay some shady outfit to do it for them? It seems unlikely?

An ad agency? It will quickly become obvious that you are getting crap return on your spend, so that seems unlikely as well.

Someone else? What is their motivation?

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Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real users?

This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots though, but I could be wrong.

I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant.

These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign.

Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game.

It happened way too many times in the past decade.

> But I don't think they would dare.

I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.

Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.

There are a ton of settlements with huge fines paid by all sorts of companies, but every time they "admit to no wrongdoing". So they pay but deny any responsibility. This is super common.

I think that prison would be an exceptional case. Typically, white collar criminals do not face justice for their crimes in the same way as common people.

you can choose to pay Facebook per sale / "conversion" instead of per clicks, it makes all the incentives more clearly aligned

I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep buying their ads.

All social media seems to suffer from 'bot traffic is traffic and all traffic is good' mentality.

If stock regulators weren't so worthless they'd make them disclose fraudulent traffic percentages.

My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.

Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on the ads.

While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create plausible deniability.

That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?

Possibly, but once things get separated by a few layers and parts of it occur overseas good luck tracking it all down.

Look into methbot.

Typically, it's people who game the algorithm (for ad dollars), and use these bots to click on other things (including ads) to make it more difficult for FB / Google / etc to detect all the traffic going to their pages and content is their own fake clicks, trying to train the algorithm to send other people to their stuff.

I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot , but I don't understand how they were making money.

Methbot was running the sites showing ads, so they got a cut. Doesn't transfer to manipulation on Facebook Ads, where I don't think that's a thing in any scenario.

More than that, YouTube pays out per video view, so they were also making non trivial money on their video content.

Fraudsters might not be able to as easily game Facebook since they don't pay per 1000 views or whatever - but they can still drive tons of traffic to websites filled with ads, scams, etc, and they can also be making money to get fake engagement to wannabe influencers, politicians, propaganda, etc

Facebook is WAAAY too big of a business to take on this liability themselves, and try to keep it secret.

They'd face securities fraud from their investors, likely huge government fines, and lawsuits from all of their advertisers.

Idly sitting by and letting the numbers pump a little higher is less of a problem.

I see. Thanks.

With AI and data scrappers, so much traffic is bots scraping for various purposes and they were following Facebook Ads and crawling the store as well but obviously never made a purchase.

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