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So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? Facebook? They have the

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught. A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistication than most companies have. And are they really going to pay some shady outfit to do it for them? It seems unlikely? An ad agency? It will quickly become obvious that you are getting crap return on your spend, so that seems unlikely as well. Someone else? What is their motivation?

hahn-kev 1y ago
Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real users?
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots though, but I could be wrong.
  - guhcampos 1y ago
    I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant. These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign. Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game. It happened way too many times in the past decade.
wussboy 1y ago
My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.
- c-linkage 1y ago
  Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on the ads. While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create plausible deniability.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Possibly, but once things get separated by a few layers and parts of it occur overseas good luck tracking it all down.
stackskipton 1y ago
With AI and data scrappers, so much traffic is bots scraping for various purposes and they were following Facebook Ads and crawling the store as well but obviously never made a purchase.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gs17 1y ago
I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep buying their ads.
- pixl97 1y ago
  All social media seems to suffer from 'bot traffic is traffic and all traffic is good' mentality. If stock regulators weren't so worthless they'd make them disclose fraudulent traffic percentages.
ryandrake 1y ago
> But I don't think they would dare. I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.
  - GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
    I think that prison would be an exceptional case. Typically, white collar criminals do not face justice for their crimes in the same way as common people.
  - S3verin 1y ago
    There are a ton of settlements with huge fines paid by all sorts of companies, but every time they "admit to no wrongdoing". So they pay but deny any responsibility. This is super common.
spongebobstoes 1y ago
you can choose to pay Facebook per sale / "conversion" instead of per clicks, it makes all the incentives more clearly aligned
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Look into methbot. Typically, it's people who game the algorithm (for ad dollars), and use these bots to click on other things (including ads) to make it more difficult for FB / Google / etc to detect all the traffic going to their pages and content is their own fake clicks, trying to train the algorithm to send other people to their stuff.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot , but I don't understand how they were making money.
  - detaro 1y ago
    Methbot was running the sites showing ads, so they got a cut. Doesn't transfer to manipulation on Facebook Ads, where I don't think that's a thing in any scenario.
    - hermitcrab 1y ago
      I see. Thanks.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
      More than that, YouTube pays out per video view, so they were also making non trivial money on their video content. Fraudsters might not be able to as easily game Facebook since they don't pay per 1000 views or whatever - but they can still drive tons of traffic to websites filled with ads, scams, etc, and they can also be making money to get fake engagement to wannabe influencers, politicians, propaganda, etc Facebook is WAAAY too big of a business to take on this liability themselves, and try to keep it secret. They'd face securities fraud from their investors, likely huge government fines, and lawsuits from all of their advertisers. Idly sitting by and letting the numbers pump a little higher is less of a problem.

hahn-kev 1y ago

Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real users?

hermitcrab 1y ago
This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots though, but I could be wrong.
- guhcampos 1y ago
  I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant. These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign. Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game. It happened way too many times in the past decade.

wussboy 1y ago

My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.

c-linkage 1y ago
Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on the ads. While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create plausible deniability.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Possibly, but once things get separated by a few layers and parts of it occur overseas good luck tracking it all down.

stackskipton 1y ago

With AI and data scrappers, so much traffic is bots scraping for various purposes and they were following Facebook Ads and crawling the store as well but obviously never made a purchase.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gs17 1y ago

I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep buying their ads.

pixl97 1y ago
All social media seems to suffer from 'bot traffic is traffic and all traffic is good' mentality. If stock regulators weren't so worthless they'd make them disclose fraudulent traffic percentages.

ryandrake 1y ago

> But I don't think they would dare. I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.

hermitcrab 1y ago
Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
  I think that prison would be an exceptional case. Typically, white collar criminals do not face justice for their crimes in the same way as common people.
- S3verin 1y ago
  There are a ton of settlements with huge fines paid by all sorts of companies, but every time they "admit to no wrongdoing". So they pay but deny any responsibility. This is super common.

spongebobstoes 1y ago

you can choose to pay Facebook per sale / "conversion" instead of per clicks, it makes all the incentives more clearly aligned

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

Look into methbot. Typically, it's people who game the algorithm (for ad dollars), and use these bots to click on other things (including ads) to make it more difficult for FB / Google / etc to detect all the traffic going to their pages and content is their own fake clicks, trying to train the algorithm to send other people to their stuff.

hermitcrab 1y ago
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot , but I don't understand how they were making money.
- detaro 1y ago
  Methbot was running the sites showing ads, so they got a cut. Doesn't transfer to manipulation on Facebook Ads, where I don't think that's a thing in any scenario.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    I see. Thanks.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    More than that, YouTube pays out per video view, so they were also making non trivial money on their video content. Fraudsters might not be able to as easily game Facebook since they don't pay per 1000 views or whatever - but they can still drive tons of traffic to websites filled with ads, scams, etc, and they can also be making money to get fake engagement to wannabe influencers, politicians, propaganda, etc Facebook is WAAAY too big of a business to take on this liability themselves, and try to keep it secret. They'd face securities fraud from their investors, likely huge government fines, and lawsuits from all of their advertisers. Idly sitting by and letting the numbers pump a little higher is less of a problem.