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Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook like fraud using honeypots

De Cristofaro, E; Friedman, A; Jourjon, G; Kaafar, MA; Shafiq, MZ; (2014) Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook like fraud using honeypots. In: Williamson, C and Aditya, A and Taft, N, (eds.) IMC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Internet Measurement Conference. (pp. pp. 129-136). ACM: New York, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook like fraud using honeypots
Event: IMC '14: Internet Measurement Conference 2014, 5 - 7 November 2014, Vancouver, Canada
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Dates: 5-7 November 2014
ISBN-13: 9781450332132
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/2663716.2663729
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2663716.2663729
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1450697
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