Slashdot Mirror
Facebook "Like" System Devalued By Fake Users
New submitter k(wi)r(kipedia) writes "A BBC investigation has found evidence of fake users skewing the results of Facebook's 'Like' recommendation system. The BBC set up a Facebook page for a fake business called VirtualBagel and invited users to 'like' it. The page reportedly attracted 'over 1,600 likes' within twenty-four hours. The test appeared to confirm the claims of a social media marketing consultant who contacted the BBC after he noticed a disparity in the distribution of users 'liking' the products of his clients. 'While they had been targeting Facebook users around the world, all their "likes" appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt.'"
Oh, and hi from the Philippines! :) We have a very liking culture over here.
nothing about.
I actually read the article and still dont really know what this is about.
Why would people just go around liking stuff.
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
... "the number one is somehow less because of the number zero."
Facebook lets them send messages to others telling them they 'like' something. So they 'like' it, then get to send the spam message advertising their viagra/rolex/whatever they're trying to sell.
Simple really. If 98% of email is spam, them likely 98% of likes are spam too.
"Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles."
If 5% of their users are fakes, that's 45 million, if each likes 5000, thats 200 billion fake likes. The bigger question is why do advertisers imagine that Facebook pages are somehow more traffic'd than Internet pages, when every facebook user is an internet user, but not every internet user is a facebook user.
It's like putting adverts in second life, remember that?
So if I understand this correctly, they're saying that some of the people on Facebook are real?
What do fake users gain by Like-ing a fake business page?
Isn't it more effective for fake users to like something that at least gives them some money in some way? I mean, spam lives from money, right?
For it to have been devalued you'd have to assume it had any value in the first place.
It implies there was value in it in the first place.
Oh, you mean value for advertisers to report to their bosses how well they were doing because so many people 'like' their stuff. Seriously? That's the best metric you assholes have at the moment?
What's not clear from the article is what was in it for the fake or foreign accounts that 'like' things regardless - is this facebook pretending that advertising there works or is this third party likers with am unknown agenda?
Well I'm not a FB user, and got that from the article, but re-reading it, I misread the article:
"Once a user has clicked on a link the company it belongs to can then post content on their news feed, send them messages and alert their friends to the connection. Facebook makes money by charging companies a fee to show adverts designed to attract new "likes"."
I thought I read that the spammer can send a message, however it is the advertiser. But then that suggests fraud from Facebook doesn't it?? The only company gaining there would be Facebook, the cheap labour is just the usual 'clicks for hire' I see adverts for these all the time here.
A friend of mine's brother is in a start up company that does this for money. They call it advertising and they swear its just as legitimate as other types of ads. Not just facebook likes, but trying to farm various sorts of social media in attempt to "make things go viral". He told me he thinks that 60% of all trends are made up this way by some company like his. Oh, there are lots of companies that do this.
"Like" has zero value in the absence of "Dislike".
Let's start a random poll.
I have about 15. Only 3 are active outside of my real life account (two different FB games I play as time wasters). The others are alts I used for helping myself when playing games. Thank goodness there are people out there who've created scripts to automate the boring functions of the game.
If you told me I'd get free poker chips or a good weapon or maybe an upgrade for my ovens in Cafe World (yes I'm joking), I'd go like whatever page you wanted me to from as many accounts as need the help. If a bonus item is giftable, that means I'm clicking like 15 times and sending it across to the main account that plays that game.
My more successful alts (of the active ones) are women, they get more random friend requests (so random game items, free clicks when I want help in a game). Games on facebook want you to spam your "friends", so I created fake accounts and use those to spam the randoms who add my account because it has a sexy profile pic instead of hassling my real life account like they want me to.
I'd suggest a large number of people playing Zynga's Mafia Wars are fakes, energy accounts gathering loot to gift across to the main account. Their recent attempts at limiting automation/autoplayers are the reason why game numbers are way down. (They're also making stupid changes in the game and getting rid of real life people, which isn't helping).
I once posted "will cyber for loot" on my status and got a LOT of free stuff sent to me in Mafia Wars. That account has a profile pic that looks a lot like Amber Herd. (I figure I'm an honorary lesbian by borrowing a female persona, so why not.) I didn't follow through on the offer, I didn't need to - no-one even asked, they just sent me a whole bunch of stuff.
The attractive women profiles are handy if I want to find out about someone on facebook, say a real life person and I want to view more detail on their FB account. My real life account is totally disconnected from the fake accounts so I can safely send a friend request to every male in the target person's friends list and at least one will accept every time. This means I end up as a "friend of a friend" any many default security options in facebook allow friends of friends to see stuff that general users can't. Facebook are tightening up a little these days so that is less effective, or at least it was until timeline came in. If you don't manually go and modify your post history, some things are open to anyone.
Lastly - I was playing Zynga poker with one of my alts, got bored and flicked over to my real life FB account (which is game spam free, and recruiter friendly), then saw this posted on the slashdot facebook page in my newsfeed. I think that's irony but Alanis Morissette has me eternally confused about that.
1,600 likes from fake people pales in comparison to 500,000 fake likes from real people for a drawing or giveaway. EVERYONE is now doing a like us on facebook, win a ______ giveaway deal. I bet Newegg and Tiger Direct got over a million likes during their repeated like-based giveaways. Yeah, I actually like Newegg but I don't much care for Tiger Direct quite the same. But for a free chance at a gaming computer, I'd like the hell out of them. That's a problem because any idiot can spot a fake profile easily but fake likes from real people devalue the whole system much worse.
For $5, you can have 50,000 people like your page in 48 hours.
http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=facebook+like
Like.
Facebook being devalued by users, even fake ones, is a refreshing change from Facebook characteristically devaluing users.
I was not aware that anyone placed any value in facebooks "like" system in the first place...
There is apparently a business for selling Likes. NPR ran a story few weeks ago - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/16/152736671/this-guy-will-sell-you-sell-you-1-000-facebook-likes
I've always been a bit uncomfortable to "Like" a company in Facebook. Paying for the particular company's products should be enough liking for them, no more cocksucking needed.
I don't personally use FB, but my wife has a business with a heavily liked Facebook page. She has made the same observation about many of the likes coming from Egypt, Philippines, etc.
From what she's told me, when you "Like" something you can tell your friends, but you have to be friends with them anyway in which case you can already send them messages. Similarly, you can post on the company's page, but you can already do that without "Liking" it (and her page doesn't get very much spam - maybe one message every 2 days or so). So it doesn't sound as though liking things gives you any ability to send messages to people that you can't already send messages to. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm very curious to know what motivation there could be for people to create fake accounts and "Like" things with them. It's ridiculous that the BBC article makes no attempt to even speculate on the obvious question.
The "civilized west" does this as well: this link (which I do not want you to click on, and I am only including it for reference) is from a copycat greek news site, with a 'catchy' domain name, where they inform you that if you 'like' their facebook profile you are "eligible to win the top Samsung smartphone priced at approximately [sic.] 670 euros". Their pages are full of sneakware/trackware as well.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
It was over a few years ago. Companies like this just take forever to die. Look at aol. Im sure some grandma in 10 years will still be on facebook, giving the companies corpse a few more bills to buy some crack.
As long as there is no "dislike" button, the whole thing is useless as a rating system.
You become old when new technologies stop making sense to you, and seem silly, unnatural, evil, or just plain valueless.
This exactly describes my opinion of Facebook, despite the fact that it is wildly successful.
Ugh. I am depressed now.
I'd been wondering who keeps 'liking' videos on porn tubes.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
There seems to be large groups of these fakes users who are connected by a few different command and control centers . I see a few use cases .... Scenario 1. You as a buisness pay for "likes" from them and real users stumble upon your page and think wow they are liked by 222,000 people they must be good/legit. Scenario 2. They use the fake users to like their own buisness/product/service to make it seem more legitimate. The business could be real or it could be FAKE and used for nefarious purposes
Scenario 3. They use the fake users to help drive up stock prices in a pump and dump scheme.
I've been pointing this out for some time now. See my paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social". As soon as some social signal feeds into search ranking, it gets spammed.
Social spamming is cheaper and easier than classic link farm spamming. Link farms cost money to set up and run. Social spam is hosted for free by Facebook, Google, Yelp. etc. Attempts to stop this have not been successful. Even if 80% of fake accounts are killed off, that just means the spammers have to run more fake account generators. Remember Google's "real names" policy? That didn't work out.
Google, and, to a lesser extent, Bing, are running into a big problem - most of their "signals" are spammable. Links are mostly spam - who links to sites that exist only to advertise? Most content, by volume, is now spam - spam blogs, scraper sites, AOL, and Demand Media. There are even spam newspapers, newspapers that get their content from Demand Media and PR Newswire. The San Francisco Chronicle does this, and fake PR then "stories" show up in Google News.
Google tried weighting links less in their Panda update.. It didn't help. Their results in heavily spammed areas became semi-random, and social spamming went up.
That's why there are all those fake accounts.
The bots that create and operate these fake user accounts are probably smarter than the average real facebook user.
There are loads of place on the internet where one can buy a "Like", places there one can trade them, and possibly other barter systems.
There are "users" that have 10's of thousands of "friends", these are purely created to promote a company, product, etc.
Much of Facebook is just for ego boosting, both for the users, and for the company. Facebook pretends that there are "125 billion friend connections", and that is a load of crap. Most of those are the "124 billion 'some-one' connections"... because many people will friend any-one (even fictitious people), and like any-thing that exists.
What value did Facebook's popularity button ever have?
"Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010."
I'm pretty sure the manager at my local gas station is 13 too... so what's the big deal?
C'mon, even without fake users, the whole "like" thing is meaningless because everyone and their brother is soliciting "likes" from people. "Come win a free XYZ - just 'like' us on Facebook!" Much as Shakespeare's Macbeth said: "it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."