Facebook Fraud

Veritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good. Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the "legitimate" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms. This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL. I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue. But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue. [1] ▶ this video

> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => ▶ this video I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video. Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)

facebook as a platform and business is hollow, but very few realize it. this is similar to Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis, Groupon, etc. history has shown that 99.99999% of people totally miss these business models that are built on a MASSIVELY fraudulent or hollow foundation. When the music stops thousands and thousands of gallons of pixels will be spilt trying to explain how nobody saw their collapse coming and why they are not to blame. Here are two videos that succinctly introduce the reality of facebook's mirage: ▶ this video link

Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: link ▶ this video I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.

There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: ▶ 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.

Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an experiment and explanation, for those who are interested. ▶ this video

Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. link (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform) ▶ this video (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)

> and now we are getting these accusations thrown at platforms etc. What?! This problem existed for so many years! And it wasn't some niche knowledge but pretty mainstream already in 2014 (Veritassium video "Facebook Fraud" with 6M views): ▶ this video

It is not just advertising. It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. If you have not spent money to advertise on facebook then please do not down vote. Update 1: Sources (Sorry, I missed them earlier) - 1. Self experience. 2. ▶ this video

How many people do you know that have ever purchased anything from a Facebook ad or clicked on one other than by accident? Ads are increasingly about product placement, brand presence and being top of mind. Especially when you can be sure that 80% of your clickthroughs on Facebook are from some bot network that Facebook doesn't bother to crack down on because it adds to their userbase metric, which is what the derive such a high valuation from. [1] I'm sure coke, nestle, and other branded basic commodities (food, drink, clothing) would love a way to show ads to this low-income segment. [1] ▶ this video

Facebook has a history of fraud in their other services. Veritasium fell victim to FB's scams as a publisher a couple years ago[1]. 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. They also have a history of encouraging video fraud[2][3]. [1] ▶ this video [2] link [3] link

Facebook is the biggest scam for most businesses. 1) They've pulled bait and switch when they decided to charge to reach users that have already liked your page. Most of those users liked your page because you've posted a link to FB on your site. 2) Click fraud is rampant [1] 3) They make money on copyrighted videos + ripping off YouTube content creators [2] [1] ▶ this video [2] link