Meta's Click Farm (Fraud) Problem
If you are new to these pages I am not a fan of Meta (META). I have always believed that Meta’s user numbers are bogus and that Zuckerberg is a bad actor.
Take for example Meta’s use of click farms. A click farm is typically hired by a business or social media influencer to inflate follower counts and likes. Meta’s dirty little secret is that they work with click farms. For example, when a legitimate business purchases a Facebook ad campaign to promote a Facebook post(s), a click farm will often “like” that post to boost engagement. Engagement encourages the ad buyer to purchase additional ads. This is the reason we stopped advertising on Facebook several years ago. My guess is that 50-60% of our ad engagement was bogus - meaning that 50-60% of the users that engaged with our ads were either bots or people with fake identities (why was a rural grandmother “liking” our post about machine learning?)
I did not purchase these engagement services which appeared on some 100-200 of our ad buys over several years. Facebook was clearly subsidizing this effort to encourage repeat purchases. Therefore, when Meta says that approximately 5% of its user base consists of bots and fake accounts, I believe the real number is around 50%. The problem is that it is impossible to audit Meta’s user numbers. The other problem is that the large ad buyers are too lazy and/or too unsophisticated to understand that they are being scammed by Zuckerberg / Meta.