From the archive. First published in November 2016. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2016 a tactic spread quickly among page owners: stream a pre-recorded video through software that made it appear as a live broadcast. Live video was being heavily favoured in the feed at the time, so a recorded clip dressed as live could reach enormous numbers from a single post.
We covered it then as a reach technique. It is worth being straight about it now: it was a loophole, it worked briefly, and it is a bad idea today for reasons that go beyond the rules.
What happened to it
- Facebook restricted the use of pre-recorded material in live broadcasts and improved detection.
- The reach advantage that made it worth doing was removed as live was normalised in ranking.
- Meta’s unoriginal and manipulated content policies, expanded through 2025 and 2026, now reduce distribution across everything an account posts when it repeatedly games distribution.
The pattern this illustrates
Every loophole in this market has the same life cycle. It is discovered, it works far better than legitimate effort for a few months, it spreads, the platform detects and closes it, and the accounts that leaned on it hardest take the hardest penalty. Like gating, engagement bait, follower buying, fake live, hashtag stuffing and content farming have all run this course.
The operators still here after fifteen years are the ones who treated loopholes as temporary and kept building something that did not depend on them.
What works instead, with evidence
Genuine live video remains the single best performing format on Facebook, at roughly four times the interaction rate of link posts and more than six times image posts. The irony is complete: the real version of the thing people were faking is still the most effective format available, and almost nobody does it because it takes actual effort.
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