NDM: Weekly News Article - W/C 30th January (41)

The real story behind Facebook 'likes'

If Facebook likes are anything to go by, the world's favourite person is Shakira

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/11116543/The-real-story-behind-Facebook-likes.html

Summary

When it comes to Facebook likes quantity is no indication of quality or even reality say researchers at UCL. In what has been labelled "the first systematic investigation into the nature of like farms and how they operate" the point has been made that likes paid for by companies to boost their Facebook followings are likely to be fake and the ones that are real are unlikely to be worth much either. The findings show that Facebook might not be an ideal medium for advertising. The overall conclusion of this research carried out by UCL researchers and a selection of other institutions suggests that although this research was carried out on a small scale majority of Facebook likes, which companies paid for are fake despite Facebook's best efforts to intercept and remove fake accounts on their platform. The researchers say that even the real likes do not account for much of a engaged following. However, researchers involved are stressing that their findings do not imply that Facebook advertising is ineffective since the campaigns that they created were done so to avert real users.   

Key Statistics

• The researchers set up 13 content-less Facebook pages about virtual electricity.Each page included the description, “This is not a real page, so please do not like it.” These pages were split into two groups, with five in one and eight in the other.

• They bought Facebook ads to promote the first group, targeting each page at users in a different region (the US, France, India, Egypt and worldwide) at a total cost of $90 over 15 days

• They used like-generating services BoostLikes.com, SocialFormula.com, AuthenticLikes.com and MammothSocials.com, which charged up to $190 for 1000 likes over the fortnight - to build the following of the other eight pages, targeting users in the US and worldwide.

My Opinion

Trying to tackle fake Facebook likes is the same as trying to tackle fake news. However, these issues have one thing in common which is that everyone offers up this research which proves how something happens or why it happens but they do not actually offer a solution to the problem. All this research is well and good but somebody needs to offer up solutions before these issues get anymore out of control than they already are. Having said that even with solutions to the problems in this age of NDM there are endless ways to hide things so not all fake likes and fake news can be caught some will slip through the fingers of the controllers trying to combat the problems.