The Newrepublic article “The BOT Bubble: How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency” is an absolute must-read and mind-blowing piece about the underground economy of fake social media accounts.
It describes in detail the operation of a ‘click farm’ in the Philippines where fake Facebook users are created by the thousands to create followers for greedy companies (hint: it takes one SIM card per user to get through the Facebook check algorithm, hence it looks more like a SIM card storage!).
According to the article, about 7 to 10% of social media users are fake, and those profiles are leveraged to create sudden ‘following’ and ‘liking’ or brands, presidential candidates etc. This can seriously distort the real following of public brands. Of course it is also a way to distort the effectiveness of online advertising and therefore, to make advertisers lose money.
Those ‘click farms’ are another massive, cheap employment created in developing countries by social networks, parallel to the legitimate service providers that provide moderation services; and other less legitimate that provide filtering services in some countries.
An online identity has got value, and some people are ready to pay heavily for fakes that they can control and have just the right profile. Accordingly, the value of real online identities is much higher, just because of the data we are giving to social networks.
Hat tip to Mitch Joel in his usually great weekly 6 links worthy of your attention.
