A very interesting video from an educational YouTube channel wants to lift the lid on Facebook’s page promotion services, and whether the likes are more legitimate than those from unofficial promotion companies.
The video, which some of you may have seen last year, talks about the two ways of getting likes on Facebook – the legitimate way, and the illegitimate way.
The investigation uses an article by BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones as a jump off – who created a fake Facebook company page, and bought a number of likes from an illegitimate like service.
Such companies use “click farms”, which operate in developing countries and are used to boost the following of Facebook or Twitter accounts, by flooding it with fake likes.
Facebook does not permit buying likes from such services, and instead offers the legitimate way of getting more likes, by “Promoting Your Page”.
However Veritasium say these official methods actually employ many of the same techniques as the unofficial sites – with many of the page likes coming from countries like Indonesia, Egypt and India.
And although Facebook said since Cellan-Jones’ article they deleted over 83m fake likes, Veritasium did some digging into their own Facebook likes, and discovered the problem was far from solved.
Find out more below: