A follow-up post related to my like farming posts from the past few weeks. I have one Facebook friend whos a 15 year old girl. Being a 15 year old girl, she tends to be pretty active on Facebook. She comments and likes and shares quite a lot of things quite a lot of the time. Nothing wrong with that at all-- Id say thats perfectly normal for someone in her demographic. But I was on a little while ago and saw some activity from her in my ticker feed-- she commented on a photo, and I hovered over it to see what it was because sometimes she finds interesting things. This one was a pretty clear like farming scam page judging by the post shed commented on, so I clicked over to the page to see whether I was right (because sometimes what looks like like farming is just a regular page posting their regular content, as I discussed in my most recent post). I was right, but that isnt what was so interesting about what I saw there. This page was a lot like the one I shared in my first post a few weeks ago. But one recent post in particular (made a couple of hours ago) was just a link to another page. What it said made my blood run cold because it was such brazen exploitation of innocent people purely for financial gain. It was a link to another page, with text along the lines of our other such and such page is now back! OK, so? Whats the big deal about that? Well remember, this is a like farming page. So what does it mean when a like farming page promotes another sister page on its posts? Especially one which implies that the page is back, as though it had ceased to exist at some point for a period of time? Well, ask yourself this. Why would a legitimate page disappear in the first place? If you like posting cat videos and create a page where you post cat videos, what legitimate reason would you have for deleting your page, losing all of your pages followers, then creating a brand new identical page where you share cat videos and have to recreate the community youve just dedicated so many hours of your life to creating all over again from scratch? Why would you do that? Neurotic? Maybe. Mental illness? Maybe. Got drunk and accidentally clicked all the way through the delete process and let the time window for recovery expire? Sure. Those are all legitimate reasons that that might happen. But if youre a con-artist or quasi-cyber criminal, what would your more likely reason be for doing that? If its not abundantly clear yet, Ill spell it out for you. You got enough likes and decided to sell it off to the highest bidder. So I went and looked at that new page, and sure enough. Same like farming techniques being used. Page had just been created a few hours earlier and had a little over 1,000 new followers from the page (or more likely, pages, plural) that has yet to be sold with hundreds of thousands of followers. This got me even more curious, just to gauge how widespread this issue of like farming actually is on Facebook. So I clicked over to my friends profile and checked out all of her likes on her about page. She had somewhere around 1,500-1,600 pages liked. I went and scrolled through the ones that werent Facebook-verified and categorized to things like sports etc.-- the Miscellaneous likes. I scrolled through a couple hundred of them, and what I saw was ridiculous. This like farming thing is very widespread, and Id wager that it makes motivated curators of like farming pages a fair amount of money-- especially if theyre smart and employ other quasi-cyber crime strategies that are beyond the scope of my post here which would aid them tremendously to pump and dump pages and pages in short periods of time. Some of these pages will jump several thousand users per hour right off the bat, and continue into the hundreds of thousands or even millions within weeks. But heres how I judged how widespread this problem actually is. Looking at WHAT those pages my friend has liked revealed to me something rather stunning. There were literally DOZENS of identical pages promoting the exact same products. Now, my friend lives in my town, and she was born here and lived her all her life. Her family is also from around here-- shes not an immigrant. But some examples of the pages shed liked were, for example, a McDonalds in Kuwait, a page promoting a political campaign in Venezuela, a page promoting tools for like farmers and the businesses who would buy pages from those like farmers, and all sorts of similar stuff. Now, Im not always right about things, but Im *FAIRLY* certain that my 15 year old friend doesnt care about politics in Venezuela, new bands promoting themselves in Vietnam, eating a Big Mac in Kuwait, online social marketing tools, spam software, or anything of the sort. Especially based on the things I see her liking, sharing, and commenting on. So yeah. Like farming is almost certainly a HUGE industry right now. So if any of you have no morals or conscience and want to make millions of dollars without really working or producing anything of actual value by exploiting others, lying, cheating, manipulating etc., you could probably get in on the ground floor pretty easily right now. Im thinking I should set up a fake Facebook profile specifically to engage with like farming pages so that I can better track them from the inside to see better how widespread it is and more details on how it actually works. Because Im wondering whether pages are sold or rented and managed, or maybe both. And Im wondering how often they change hands, or if theyre mostly use-once throwaways. By doing that, I could most likely see just how tacitly approving Facebook as a business is of this kind of exploitation. My guess is they may just turn a blind eye to it because no one is really aware of it and dont care about it. And those people who do care about it are probably savvy enough to just not engage, so theyre shielded from the consequences. I also have a new theory that the reason some of Facebooks marketing data used in selecting what you see while browsing the site-- including ads and suggestions-- are so abysmally wrong at times. Thats the real problem from Facebooks perspective. Their business is rooted in providing marketing opportunities to legitimate businesses, and the service they provide other than over a billion pairs of eyes to see ads and promotions is fine-grained selection criteria so you can narrowly focus your marketing efforts. But when those algorithms are tainted with loads of bad data due to scam artists like like farmers, youre kinda shooting yourself in the foot. Unless the marketing people just dont care, or unless theyre simply willing to pay for barely perceptibly better targeted results. Or even scarier to me, the marketing types just dont realize how bad this is FOR THEM. They are indirectly victims of these scams themselves, but it takes an astute observer to understand just how and why, and what the effects of it are. If they were smart, theyd all gather together and institute an industry-wide agreement not to use deceptive or exploitative marketing techniques, and hold those who do accountable. But I dont think the vast majority of people who do marketing understand how bad some of the things they do to benefit themselves are EVEN TO THEMSELVES. Maybe I should write a paper on that and try to get it published in a trade publication.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 03:59:02 +0000
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