Does Facebook, like, have a like problem?

A heart-wrenching photo of a Syrian orphan appears in your Facebook News Feed, having been shared by one of your friends. The status update challenges you to like and share as a show of support and love for this child who feels unloved. With 1-million likes then that child will finally know that he or she is cherished. Are you in or are you out? We’ve all encountered that moment and we’ve all clicked like.

Remember the old saying that ‘if you are not the customer, then you are the product.’ Congratulations, you were just commoditised (again).

The game of Facebook likes and the economy which has built up around it is under increased scrutiny as the ‘attention economy’ grows and evolves around the world’s most influential social network and its mysterious News Feed algorithm which ultimately dictates what we all see on our Facebook home pages.

Getting back to that Syrian orphan from earlier… Once enough likes, comments and shares are reached on that particular page, it’ll be stripped bare faster than a Toyota Hilux in a Cape Flats chop shop, and repackaged to hawk some dodgy product or other, or else will simply be sold on to another company willing to pay black market rates for a captive Facebook audience.

Fundamentally, there are essentially two immediately achievable ways to get new likes on Facebook and a third if you get lucky. You can either take the adult responsible route of paying Facebook to deliver you a relevant and engaged advertising demographic or you can lurk around the digital back door and find a crowd that ‘fell off the back of the delivery vehicle and was it just sitting there so someone had to use it’.

The third route of course is to produce incredibly dynamic, useful and sticky content that gets lucky, finds the right connectors and becomes a bona-fide phenomenon. Not always under your control, that third option.

Most advertisers are savvy enough to recognise that buying an audience will in no way translate into real people who actively engage with your product or service and who will become ambassadors and clients for your company. But what if the likes that you pay for via Facebook’s phenomenally successful advertising delivery mechanisms, also deliver an audience with practically no engagement? Does that not threaten the entire economy underpinning this social media economy?

These seems to be the findings from an experiment and subsequent YouTube video in February 2014 by a user called Derek Muller, who hosts the weekly science podcast on YouTube called Veritasium.

Muller makes his money from his YouTube videos and uses Facebook to reach consumers with new content and to drive traffic to his YouTube channel. But when he purchased 80 000 new followers, he was shocked to discover that the engagement with his page had actually gone down, and so he undertook an experiment to find out why this could be. It’s a subtle and fairly intricate experiment which you should watch right here:

In a nutshell, Muller found that the vast majority of the likes he got from Facebook advertising came from countries such as Bangladesh, India, Egypt and Sri Lanka and from people who liked hundreds and hundreds of random pages. But their engagement with the pages that they have liked, the 80 000 followers, hovers at around 0%. No engagement at all. Worthless. Muller emphasises that he never bought followers, but rather “these are the profiles that I got when I used Facebook advertising”. For all you know, you might even have been one of those likes, courtesy of the Syrian refugee that you tried to show your support for.

Business Insider caused a ripple of anxiety earlier this year when it provided statistical proof that giant sharing site Upworthy had lost 46% of its traffic in two months after tweaks to the News Feed algorithm.

Another article implied that emerging giant BuzzFeed was buying its way into the Facebook News Feed, and giving itself the appearance of virality rather than actually earning it.

It’s a problem for Facebook, who’s greatest asset is the entertainment value of its News Feed feature, so manipulation of which content appears in the feed and how is potentially extremely damaging, particularly if advertisers no longer believe in the true weight of a pages reach. Fake likes imply fake value, which does not attract investment.

An article by Andrew Donald on Salon.com also notes that “unlike a fraudulent click on Google, these fake likes on Facebook stay with you forever (even two years later when Facebook’s fraud detection has moved on). They weigh on your engagement and EdgeRank because the accounts never intended to engage with you. And then you end up paying again to boost the post out to them — and they were never real in the first place!”

Most experts agree that Facebook has gotten a lot better at identifying and weeding out likes from ‘click farms’, usually situated in developing countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Egypt. But it becomes that much harder for Facebook to identify fake likes once real people have actually been baited into liking something, and those users are then sold on the black market as an audience available for any other products?

Muller’s theory in his Facebook Fraud video is that unscrupulous firms in developing countries no longer simply click ‘Like’ on products that they are paid to boost, as that is too easy for Facebook to trace and block. But rather these firms simply blanket Facebook in a torrent of likes in all directions, making it much easier for them mask the products that they are illegally boosting.

This practice, coupled with the harvesting of fake likes via sympathy pages, is seriously distorting the very essence of the interactions that lies at the heart of the new social media economy. How Facebook deals with these challenges in the near future will determine to a very large degree how successfully it is able to maintain its runaway growth and profitability.

There are many reputable companies and media organisations involved and billions of dollars in revenue are at stake. Salon.com summed it up rather neatly: “As traffic to content publishers becomes more and more dominated by social media sharing, everybody wants to understand what’s inside the black box that is Facebook’s News Feed algorithm. The stakes here are nothing less than the future of online publishing.”

Image: Denis Dervisevic via Flickr.