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.

Preview

Text DeCristofaro_2paying_for_likes_understanding.pdf - Accepted Version Download (1MB) | Preview

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.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item