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Facebook Fraud

Name: Facebook Fraud
Uploaded: 2014-02-10T14:30:02Z
Duration: 9 min
Channel: Veritasium
Description: An investigation into Facebook's advertising system, demonstrating how paid promotions can result in fake likes from click farms that harm page engagement.

Veritasium

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Recommended by 7 people: 7 on Hacker News.
A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2025.
May be out of date. The tools, versions or practices it shows have likely moved on.
An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

6.5M views12 years ago7 recommendations

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An investigation into Facebook's advertising system, demonstrating how paid promotions can result in fake likes from click farms that harm page engagement.

Evidence Facebook's revenue is based on fake likes. My first vid on the problem with Facebook: bit.ly/1dXudqY I know first-hand that Facebook's advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless. I am not the only one who has experienced this. Rory Cellan-Jones had the same luck with Virtual Bagel: bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18819338 The US Department of State spent $630,000 to acquire 2 million page likes and then realized only 2% were engaged. wapo.st/1glcyZo I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again. And it's possible to be a victim of fake likes without even advertising. Pages that end up on Facebook's "International Suggested Pages" are also easy targets for click-farms seeking to diversify their likes. tnw.co/NsflrC Thanks to Henry, Grey, and Nessy for feedback on earlier drafts of this video.

Why it's here

7 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers cite this video when discussing the flaws of social media advertising, click farms, and fake engagement metrics.

simiason Hacker News • 12 years agoRecommends

On “Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money”

There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: link to this video It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently). What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate "likers" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.