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Like fraud

Facebook offers an advertising tool for pages to get more “likes”. According to Business Insider, this advertising tool is called “Suggested Posts” or “Suggested Pages”, allowing companies to market their page to thousands of new users for as little as $50 USD.

Global fortune 100 firms are increasingly using social media marketing tools as the number of “likes” per Facebook page has rose by 115% globally.Biotechnology company Comprendia investigated Facebook’s “likes” through advertising by analyzing the life science pages with the most likes. They concluded that at as much as 40% of “likes” from company pages are suspected to be fake. to Facebook’s annual report, an estimated 0.4% and 1.2% of active users are undesirable accounts that create fake likes.

Small companies such as PubChase have publicly testified against Facebook’s advertising tool, claiming legitimate advertising on Facebook creates fraudulent Facebook “likes”. In May 2013, PubChase decided to build up their Facebook following through Facebook’s advertising, which promises to “connect with more of the people who matter to you.” After the first day, the company grew suspicious of the increased likes as they ended up with 900 likes from India. According to PubChase, none of the users behind the “likes” seemed to be scientists. The statistics from Google Analytics indicate that India is not in the company’s main user base. PubChase continues by stating that Facebook has no interface to delete the fake likes; rather, the company must manually delete each follower themselves.

In February 2014, Derek Muller uses his YouTube account Veritasium to upload a YouTube video “Facebook Fraud”. Within 3 days, the video has turned viral with more than a million views (It has reached 2,521,614 views as of June 10th, 2014). In the video, Muller illustrates how after paying $50 USD to Facebook advertising, the “likes” to his fan page have tripled in a few days and soon reached 70,000 “likes”, compared to his original 2,115 likes before the advertising. Despite the significant increase in likes, Muller noticed his page has actually decreased in engagement – there were less people commenting, sharing, and liking his posts and updates despite the significant increase in “likes”. Muller also noticed that the users that “liked” his page were users that liked hundreds of other pages, including competing pages such as AT&T and T-Mobile. He theorizes that users are purposely clicking “like” on any and every page in order to deter attention away from the pages they were paid to “like”. Muller claims, “I never bought fake likes, I used Facebook legitimate advertising, but the results are as if I paid for fake likes from a click farm”

In response to the fake “likes” complaints, Facebook told Business Insider:

We're always focused on maintaining the integrity of our site, but we've placed an increased focus on abuse from fake accounts recently. We've made a lot of progress by building a combination of automated and manual systems to block accounts used for fraudulent purposes and Like button clicks. We also take action against sellers of fake clicks and help shut them down.