Facebook's Flawed Advertising Platform

After perusing Reddit, I came across this interesting video regarding Facebook's advertising platform.  A user wanted to determine just how effective Facebook's advertising agorithims were, so he created a page and paid for likes.  Yes, paid.  While Facebook obviously wants you to use their ad platform to increase awareness with the end goal of gaining likes, users can pay 3rd party sites for a certain number of likes, which stem from 'click farms' in places like Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.  So when this user decided to advertise the legitimate way through Facebook to the US and Canada, where do you think the majority of his likes came from?  Developing countries like Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

The user began noticing that the people who liked his page, also liked thousands of other pages and were particularly disengaged-similar behavior to the likes you receive from like farms.  These 'fake likes' behave much differently from 'real likes' as they do not engage (like, comment, or share) your posts.  While Facebook claimed to get rid of 83 million 'fake accounts' in 2012, there are still a considerable mass of fake accounts who've managed to avoid Facebook's Fraud Algorithims.  How? In order to avoid detection, click farms like pages other than the ones they've been paid for to seem more genuine.  It would be very easy to spot fake likes stemming from one geographic region to another in a matter of hours, but mixed in with a slew of other 'like' activity, it would be impossible to identify.  So why is this such a big deal? These fake likes are worse than useless, they detract from your page.

When you make a post, Facebook distributes it to a small fraction of the people who like your page just to gauge their reaction.  If they engage your post by liking, commenting, or sharing it, then Facebook distributes the post to more of the people who like your page. However, if you amass a number of fake likes, then Facebook's original distribution goes out to  fewer real fans resulting in lower engagement, consequently reaching a smaller audience.  This is how a rising number of likes can result in lower engagement. So ultimately Facebook makes you pay twice, once to acquire new fans, and another time to engage them.