How do you feel if I tell you it’s possible to buy followers on Facebook, generate fake web traffic or obtain market ratings on the internet? And with it, falsify the results a brand achieves or fraudulently drum up attention for a product, an opinion or a person.
All of that and much more is possible through the recently uncovered click farms, or like farms.
The like farm business
But let’s take it step by step.
How it all started
Some time ago a well known YouTuber, David Cantone, published an article about advertising fraud on Facebook, backing the position set out in Derek Muller’s viral video.
In the video, Muller stuck his nose into Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, Facebook, and into how badly it works when friends, clicks and so on can be obtained fraudulently.
The truth is it isn’t only a Facebook thing: portals of every kind are exposed to these practices.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, holiday portals, restaurant portals, entertainment listings and anywhere advertising and audiences can be traded.
What is a click farm?
I don’t know whether this comes as news to you, but in countries such as China there are what’s known as click farms.
A click farm is a place where public rankings can be manipulated without the slightest difficulty: for apps, games, polls, backing public figures through social media, gaining friends, followers and so on.
These click farms run on a farmer. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you need an operator, usually cheap labour. A farmer’s tasks are to download apps, install them, uninstall them, comment and uninstall, over and over, across different devices, in order to push up the ranking.
At first it was all simpler, done with bots, but things have got more complicated and now you can see one person sitting in front of hundreds of phones, organically working on behalf of a brand.
The price is around 11,200 dollars to push an app to the top of the sales charts, and 65,000 dollars a week to keep it there.
What do like farms offer?
- Facebook friends
- Twitter followers
- Product marketing scores
- Favourable opinions of our brand
- Generating trends and opinions
Opinion
I’ve always believed that wrongdoing runs a step ahead of justice. Either way, we all carry some responsibility of our own to form an opinion about things, to be critical of everything and everyone, and to make good use of the new technologies which have undoubtedly brought us some very good things, but which are also a new source of deception and fraud, as anywhere else where things are traded.
