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Facebook Fraud

Veritasium · 6.6M views · 2014-02-10 · 9:00

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Overview

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

On Hacker News

Frequently cited as the source for claims about click farms and fake likes in Facebook advertising, though some argue its methodology was flawed.

Recommended by 7 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2014–2025

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What people said

game_the0ry · 2025-11 · Recommendation

Veritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good. Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the "legitimate" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms. This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL. I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue. But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue. [1] [VIDEO]

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sean_patel · 2016-11 · Recommendation

> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => [VIDEO] I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video. Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)

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lingben · 2015-08 · Recommendation

facebook as a platform and business is hollow, but very few realize it. this is similar to Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis, Groupon, etc. history has shown that 99.99999% of people totally miss these business models that are built on a MASSIVELY fraudulent or hollow foundation. When the music stops thousands and thousands of gallons of pixels will be spilt trying to explain how nobody saw their collapse coming and why they are not to blame. Here are two videos that succinctly introduce the reality of facebook's mirage: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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