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618 points elorant | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.638s | source
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zupreme ◴[] No.26194436[source]
It took time, and many thousands of dollars, before I realized that the vast majority of “likes” my pages received as a result of paid campaigns on FB were from accounts which were clearly not real people.

A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots, or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and view content which FB was paid to advertise.

Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google Analytics.

In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more.

I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it persists because most people, self included, simply complain and move on once we notice the “game” but don’t sue.

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1. iamacyborg ◴[] No.26194824[source]
Fraud in advertising isn't just a Facebook issue. The entire digital advertising ecosystem is chock full of fraud. Of course, ad networks aren't incentivised to do much about it, because they get their cut even when ad impressions are fraudulent.

I spoke with Augustine Fou late last year for my podcast about digital fraud, it was pretty eye-opening to say the least.

https://www.mql.fm/002-60-million-60-billion-ad-fraud-questi...