Facebook Fraud: Illegitimate Clicks and Declining Organic Reach

For weeks, various Facebook pages and users have been noticing an increasing problem, drawing attention to their noticeable decline in user activity. It’s clear that from all of the users who follow their pages, many aren’t equally being exposed to each and every (or even any) post from the pages they like and interact with.

Liking a page on Facebook, akin to subscribing to your favorite magazine or news station, should enable you to see not a select variety, but each and every single one of its posts on the page. It turns out that many celebrities, businesses and even the U.S. State Department have bought bogus Facebook likes, Twitter followers or YouTube viewers from offshore click farms, and Facebook’s advertisement services appear useless and fraudulent.

Facebook was originally realized for the purpose of connecting students with one another, it quickly snowballed into being an open social media platform for anyone and everyone, and not just for those with a school e-mail address. Realizing the marketing potential for exposure, it wasn’t long before many diverse public pages started to be created aside from private personal accounts. Pages started to pop-up that represented bands, clothing labels, restaurants, multi-national corporations, and more. It also became a source of news for millions, who instead of seeing photographs of lunch meals and status updates from friends, were able to use their Facebook accounts to keep up with our current events that pepper ours news feed daily.

Making a point not to “sell out” in its infancy stages, it wasn’t long before Facebook started to (like so many others) trade integrity for dollars. Facebook is undoubtedly more concerned with its shareholders than its users. Facebook began limiting what posts its users were able to see as they started transitioning toward charging for post exposure; they want people to pay for their posts to reach people. I assume I am not alone in noticing that many of my favorite pages almost never show up in my newsfeed anymore.

With the increase in limitations on what users can see on their news feed, even from those pages who they’ve taken the time to subscribe to, organic reach for posts has dropped from roughly 20% to around 1% of available users. We have seen this at Exposing The Truth, and have heard the same from many others.

This means that important posts aren’t going to be seen as easily, and just because you subscribe to a page doesn’t mean you are going to be exposed to many of its posts. In fact, it seems you are more likely to see what people you do not know are posting in the groups you belong to than the pages you like. Because of how facebook does seem to show posts (as a function of interaction and clicks), viral hoaxes still go farther than fact-based texts.

Although Facebook offers the service of exposing your ads for a certain price, many pages who have taken advantage of their service claim that they weren’t happy with the results. Some have even insinuated that perhaps the new likes that came to their page aren’t even from real accounts, further pressing that most likely these new clicks are from “click farms”.People in developing countries like Nepal, India, and the Philippines, are getting paid roughly $1 per 1000, and will frequent millions of pages collectivity with their illegitimate clicks. Likes that come from these farms are useless as they result in little page engagement, not only that but Facebook explicitly prohibits such activity.

Unsurprisingly this has driven many to increasingly criticize the corporation over this issue as well as others. Many users also continue to make the jump elsewhere to other platforms as well like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Unfortunately, none of these offer the versatility or universal connectivity as Facebook. Only one thing seems certain: as soon as a viable and legitimate Facebook alternative surfaces, many will abandon ship for it.

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