←back to thread

618 points elorant | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
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.

replies(8): >>26194545 #>>26194577 #>>26194824 #>>26194865 #>>26195304 #>>26196701 #>>26199633 #>>26199952 #
1. erehweb ◴[] No.26194865[source]
Unlikely that these accounts were run by FB. More likely by other companies with their own objectives, such as creating plausible fake users.
replies(1): >>26195382 #
2. cyberlab ◴[] No.26195382[source]
> such as creating plausible fake users

Define a 'plausible' user? Facebook just wants your phone number and uses that as the only metric to determine it's a human behind the account. And as we know, there is no shortage of phone numbers to use from places like Twilio where you can mass-generate an army of Facebook users.