From the archive. First published in August 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
We originally shared the video essay “Facebook Fraud”, which examined what actually happens when a page buys targeted likes: an influx of accounts that like the page and then engage with nothing, dragging down the page’s measured quality.
A decade later this remains the most reliable way to make a page worthless, and the mechanism is worth understanding precisely.
The arithmetic problem
Reach rate and engagement rate are both calculated against followers. Adding followers who never engage mechanically reduces both, and the page size curve shows how steeply: from around 4.35 percent reach at 1,000 to 5,000 followers down to 0.50 percent above 100,000.
So inflating your follower count does not just fail to help. It actively worsens every metric a buyer or an advertiser will look at.
The ranking problem
Distribution is driven by how people respond. An audience that never responds is a signal that your content is not worth showing, and the system cannot distinguish between followers who were bought and followers who are simply indifferent.
The resale problem
This is the one most relevant here. Bought followings are visible to anyone who knows what to look for:
- Follower growth in vertical steps rather than a curve.
- Audience countries that have nothing to do with the page’s language or subject.
- Comments that are short, generic and interchangeable across every post.
- Engagement that stays flat regardless of content quality.
- Likes vastly outnumbering every other interaction, consistently.
We refuse these pages on intake, and so does any venue worth using. A page with a fake audience cannot be monetised, cannot be repaired and cannot be resold. There is no price low enough to make it a sensible purchase.
The buyer’s side of this check is in how to spot a page with fake likes.
Thinking of selling?
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