Do “likes” on social media still have any real significance today?

Annikajulia Weber
Nov 7 · 3 min read

In the fast-changing and inter-connected environment we life in, information seems more than ever be available for a large audience. Public reviews and comments posted online increase transparency and companies try hard to keep customers interested in their products or services. One-way companies do so is reaching out through social media- using applications like Instagram or Facebook to communicate news, promote new offers, or campaign their products using celebrities. (Or today, the so-called influencers).

Using these new kind of mediums seemed logical to me. Personally, I am not a big fan of social media and I try to limit my usage to 20 minutes per day (messaging friends I have all over the world on Instagram, I gave up Facebook 5 years ago due to privacy issues I wasn’t d’accord with), but in the end, after moving a lot around the globe, especially Instagram stories are a huge advantage to somehow stay in touch with people. Only following around 300 people on Instagram (people I personally know) and being followed by around the same number, I felt my engagement levels were quite high, and people not only liked my posts but also commented. However, for some profiles, I discovered that even tough people had many likes for their pictures, they had significantly less comments to their pictures, in comparison to my small amount of likes but around the same number of comments. And what we learned in class yesterday really explained this situation: Companies buy clicks, to boost their social media presence. While it is possible that these likes come from real people, the engagement is “fake”, and it doesn’t lead to any more visibility on-line at all.

This is because most of these likes and clicks are generated by people working in clicks farms. Most click farms are found for example in Egypt, Bangladesh and India, (Cheaib, 2017; TheStartup, 2018) and employees would earn as little as $1 per 1,000 likes. (Benzinga, 2017), meaning people would basically sit in front of a desk and like content, manipulating the algorithm, resulting in more likes but not in actual popularity, since the likes weren’t generated by real fans or actual customers.

Click farms operate in the gray zone, some companies such as Facebook warn about lower engagement rates after purchasing likes, but it is still possible to buy them. Click farm workers are not protected by labor laws and will sit in front of their desks in dark, poorly accommodated rooms for 12 hours straight. The severe working conditions are not justified with a fair pay either. (Cracked, 2017)

Should companies, trying to run a successful social media marketing campaign, be concerned with the number of clicks and likes they receive for their pages, or are there metrics outdated, if we take manipulated likes into consideration, generated by click farms. Should companies focus on realer measurements of customer reach, for example engagement on their pages?

In my opinion, click farms are not only morally unacceptable and are working conditions violated, but they also do not create any value for the company trying to increase their popularity on social media either. The only entity that actually benefits is the social media application or agency selling the likes. Social media companies are still quite new and governments and law makers need to address these new kinds of issues, and step in to protect users and workers. With social media companies increasing in market share, change need to happen right now and we cannot wait any longer to fuel the “fake like” economy.

References:

Pastoor, Idhuna. (29/04/2019) A look behind the scenes of cilck farms. Diggit magazine.

Cheaib, Ali. (2017) Have you heard of Click-Farms? Medium.

The Startup. (2018). Click Farms and Social Media. Jakub Ferencik.

Benzinga. (2017). What to know about click farms. Shanthi Rexaline.

Cracked. (2017). The Hellish reality of working at an overseas ‘click farm’. Evan. V. Symon.

Annikajulia Weber

Written by

Master of Art student at The American University in Dubai.

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