Facebook Fraud
Why Hacker News recommends it
Frequently cited as the source for claims about click farms and fake likes in Facebook advertising, though some argue its methodology was flawed.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2014 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends simias · 2014-04 · on “Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money”
There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: [this video] It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently). What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate "likers" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.
Recommends Riseed · 2014-04 · on “Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money”
Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an experiment and explanation, for those who are interested. [this video]
Recommends vacri · 2014-04 · on “Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down”
Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. [LINK] (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform)
Recommends Veedrac · 2015-03 · on “Reasons not to use Facebook”
Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: [LINK] [this video] I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.
Recommends lingben · 2015-08 · on “Why Facebook’s video theft problem can’t last”
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: [this video] [LINK]
Recommends sean_patel · 2016-11 · on “We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even”
> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => [this video] I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) 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)
Recommends game_the0ry · 2025-11 · on “Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams”
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
Cites selmnoo · 2014-02 · on “Facebook made my teenager into an ad”
> It's just immoral to use children their images in adds. And I don't think that this fits Zuckerbergs original intentions when he started Facebook. Heh, really? Are we talking about the same Zuckerberg who got his start making webapps by having people rate illegitimately-gained pictures of his peers? ("The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive."). [LINK] Or the guy who called people who submitted information to his site "dumb fucks"? ( [LINK] ). This latest move is exactly the quintessent