Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots
This addresses the issue of fraudulent popularity metrics for Facebook page owners and advertisers, but it is incremental as it builds on prior suspicions without a new paradigm.
The study tackled the problem of Facebook like fraud by comparing likes from ads and like farms using honeypot pages, finding that some farms use bots openly while others mimic user behavior.
Facebook pages offer an easy way to reach out to a very large audience as they can easily be promoted using Facebook's advertising platform. Recently, the number of likes of a Facebook page has become a measure of its popularity and profitability, and an underground market of services boosting page likes, aka like farms, has emerged. Some reports have suggested that like farms use a network of profiles that also like other pages to elude fraud protection algorithms, however, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no systematic analysis of Facebook pages' promotion methods. This paper presents a comparative measurement study of page likes garnered via Facebook ads and by a few like farms. We deploy a set of honeypot pages, promote them using both methods, and analyze garnered likes based on likers' demographic, temporal, and social characteristics. We highlight a few interesting findings, including that some farms seem to be operated by bots and do not really try to hide the nature of their operations, while others follow a stealthier approach, mimicking regular users' behavior.