As soon as Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) decided to get rid of the fake ‘likes’ on its website, there are reports claiming that it has won more than $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers selling fake likes to the businesses. There are businesses who buy likes to popularize their content or brands on the social platform.
Fake ‘likes’ do more harm
The largest social networking site has come out aggressively saying that buying likes do more harm than good, and could mean that companies are actually doing less business.
Facebook said in a blog post that it is determined to punish spammers because businesses and people use the platform to connect with real people and results rather than fake ones. Facebook mentioned in its blog that the time has come to take legal action along with creating sophisticated anti-spam algorithms.
It explained: “Fake-like-pedlars tempt Page admins with offers to “buy 10,000 likes!” or other similar schemes.
Facebook to cut profits of spammers
Facebook Site Integrity Engineer Matt Jones said that Facebook is aggressively determined to do away with these spammers, who are only motivated to earn profit.
Jones said that spammers behind fake likes are only motivated by one goal that is to earn profit without offering any value in the return. Jones said that these spammers earn profit by generating a maximum number of fake likes to Facebook page administrators, who are incapable to understand that such likes will not flourish their business.
Further, the company mentioned in its blog that scammers create fake accounts or break into the real accounts to send spam to other users thereby generating more fake likes. It, also, read that spammers are only concerned with their profits, and Facebook is determined to make this business less profitable for such peoples.
Extent of fake ‘likes’
Back in 2012, the BBC released a report over the fake ‘likes’ issue. Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent created a fake company VirtualBagel to find out the extent of the fake like. The investigation concluded that much of the ‘likes’ that VirtualBagel received were from suspicious accounts.
These spammers can be identified easily by searching on Google with keyword “buy Facebook likes.” One can see plenty of offers, including companies that displayed whole set of options including “10K Likes for $480” and for $1,200, 50k likes can be bought.
