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Facebook Working To Weed Out Fake Likes
jfruh writes In the early days of brands on Facebook, it was crucial for companies to garner as many "likes" as possible to boost their image, and that led to some unethical businesses selling likes that came from fake accounts. Now Facebook is informing brands that they're working to root out fake likes, leaving like counts lower but realer. Now if only I could get my relatives to stop clicking on pictures that say they like puppies and are against cancer.
They are not going to get very far weeding out fake likes when their system is set up to bribe people for likes.
What facebook needs to do is add a dislike button like youtube has.
If I want to comment on my local government's facebook page to complain about something why the fuck do I have to LIKE them first.
Secondly facebook should crack down on companies asking for likes to enter competitions or get discount coupons at their shop.
Perhaps you should first find realer words than "realer". Like "more reliable"? Or "more realistic"?
They're fine with fake anything that helps their bottom line.
Why is Snark Required?
I am admin for a good-sized group (>1000 fans). We see about a 50-50 mix of real humans and fake accounts requesting to join the group. Curiously, the fake ones have similar structure: Photo of a lovely young Asian lady, and a weird name, and male sex.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Fake likes is Facebook's entire business model. Getting rid of fake likes would be like McDonalds saying they are going to get rid of unhealthy food.
Excellent youtube video describing the problem with Facebook's commercialized likes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
I wish it was somehow smarter about hiding categories of content.
My neighbor frequently shares pages/people's posts about New Agey kinds of food topics -- "10 reasons why boiled kale improves your aura". I use the "Hide all from Melanie Stargazer" option to block it, but there doesn't seem to be a way to train Facebook to block other similar pages/content types.
My guess is many of these shares are from people trying to make a career out of being digital holistic gurus of some kind and pay Facebook to promote their posts. But I wish I could train it to identify this category of post and just never see it again.
I also feel like I've blocked countless radio station shares, which must also be paying to promote their content. But I don't want to see clickbait from "101.3 The Wave" or any other station I've never heard of.
Still another is the mass tag shared post, often from an organization/entity -- "Foo Bar with Manny Smith and 47 others". I'm pretty sure the mass tagging is done to develop maximum exposure, but it seems to abuse the putative social intent of tagging a post as identifying people actually with the poster.
Yet another annoyance is the phenomenon of people posting replies that contain ONLY people's names as tags. Occasionally I want to see the comments to a post, but often the majority are just name tagging. There should be a way to hide those so that only the people tagged and/or their friends (depending on security settings) see them.
Damnit, Facebook. If it wasn't for fake likes, I wouldn't have no likes at all.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere