The Problem With Facebook

2veritasium · 3.1M views · 2014-01-14 · 6:59

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it, with its follow-up, as an exposé of fake likes and bot activity, and as a warning before spending on Facebook ads.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 9 months · HN mentions 2014–2018

Topics

Tech industry & business models Product, marketing & sales Internet culture & memes

What people said

lingben · 2017-04 · Strong recommendation
for a fantastic expose of how facebook is riddled with fraud and bots, check out veritasium's two videos: facebook fraud [LINK] the problem with facebook [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

lingben · 2015-04 · Strong recommendation
for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for facebook's business model: facebook fraud: [LINK] the problem with facebook: [VIDEO] > From January 2013 to February 2014, a global team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Microsoft’s and AT&T’s research labs, as well as Boston and Northeastern Universities, conducted an experiment designed to determine just how often advertising campaigns resulted in likes from fake profiles. The researchers ran ten Facebook advertising campaigns, and when they analyzed the likes resulting from those campaigns, they found that 1,867 of the 2,767 likes—or about 67 percent—appeared to be illegitimate. After being informed of these suspicions, Facebook corroborated much of the team’s work by erasing 1,730 of the likes. Sympathetic researchers from a study run by the online marketing website Search Engine Journal have suggested that targeted Facebook advertisements can yield suspicious likes at a rate above 50 percent. In the fall of 2014, Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College of London presented research which found that even a page explicitly labeled as fake gained followers—the vast majority presumably bots. > The bot buildup can even affect companies that aren’t advertising with Facebook, but are just passively hoping their pages gain real fans. In 2014, Harvard University’s Facebook fan
Read the original HN comment ↗

lingben · 2014-09 · Strong recommendation
facebook ads are junk and have been proven to be so before you waste any money, watch these two videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by 2veritasium, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks

SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources