for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for faceb

for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for facebook's business model: facebook fraud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag the problem with facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g > From January 2013 to February 2014, a global team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Microsoft’s and AT&T’s research labs, as well as Boston and Northeastern Universities, conducted an experiment designed to determine just how often advertising campaigns resulted in likes from fake profiles. The researchers ran ten Facebook advertising campaigns, and when they analyzed the likes resulting from those campaigns, they found that 1,867 of the 2,767 likes—or about 67 percent—appeared to be illegitimate. After being informed of these suspicions, Facebook corroborated much of the team’s work by erasing 1,730 of the likes. Sympathetic researchers from a study run by the online marketing website Search Engine Journal have suggested that targeted Facebook advertisements can yield suspicious likes at a rate above 50 percent. In the fall of 2014, Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College of London presented research which found that even a page explicitly labeled as fake gained followers—the vast majority presumably bots. > The bot buildup can even affect companies that aren’t advertising with Facebook, but are just passively hoping their pages gain real fans. In 2014, Harvard University’s Facebook fans were most engaged in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (They stated that they did not pay for likes.) A 2012 article in The New York Times suggested that as much as 70 percent of President Obama’s 19 million Twitter followers were fake. (His campaign denied buying followers.) Less prominent pages from across the world—from those belonging to the English metal band Red Seas Fire to international bloggers—have been spontaneously overwhelmed by bots that are attempting to mask their illicit activity by glomming on to real social media profiles.