Buy Facebook Likes?

Recently I watched a documentary on ZDF. It was about the illusory world of Facebook & Co. What it was in particular about was how users of Facebook & Co. can manipulate their popularity. The show looked at bands or make-up testers, who seemed to be very successful and popular because of their amount of views and likes. There is a downside of these figures though. Some of these people are not successful at all and therefore have trouble getting likes.

Now here comes the illusory part: To increase their popularity they just buy likes or views to make it seem they are popular. From this they hope they get more real people to watch or like them. Yes you heard right. They BUY likes. The figures are being manipulated. Apparently they even give fake comments. I could not believe it when heard it for the first time (yes, for me it was completely new). And it gets better. There are actual companies who are specialized in exactly doing this: marketing agencies. That’s the service they sell. Just type in google “likes kaufen” and you get immediately hits. The first one for example: https://fanpage-likes-kaufen.eu/

Seems pretty straight forward, right? And here are some prices:

My first thought was “and this is completely legal?” Not too easy to answer this question it seems. The companies argue that marketing agencies (or social media marketing as they call it) would have been doing this all the time. Here, in the case of buying likes or views, it would be only a new method, but it would actually be nothing new. There would have always been tactics involving cheating to win more customers these companies say and that it would be quite normal for the business.

I was not happy with their arguments and googled a bit. It seems the legal situation is not clear yet. Under certain circumstances a person or a company may not get into trouble if buying likes or views. I am not a person who klicks on “I like” very often or watches a lot of youtube videos. And I don’t look at these figures (how many views? how many likes?). I cannot tell therefore if these figures would influence me. The only thing I know is that I do not think that this is right. It just seems not right and I cannot understand why there is no real case law yet on these issues. This is an assumption, because I couldn’t really find any current or vital judgements on that. I just wanted to share my thoughts on this issue. I even don’t know how one could make sure if the figures are right or not. Maybe I should buy a like for this article, he? Who knows, maybe even a comment ;)