During my time at Facebook, I saw compromised accounts functioning in droves in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Most of these accounts were commandeered through autolikers: online programs which promise users automatic likes and other engagement for their posts. Signing up for the autoliker, however, requires the user to hand over account access. Then, these accounts join a bot farm, where their likes and comments are delivered to other autoliker users, or sold en masse, even while the original user maintains ownership of the account.
Now, there’s a few things to keep in mind: 10.5 million fake reactions may sound like an impossibly large and impactful number, but this is the nature of an abuse vector that relies on creating large amounts of low-quality scripted activity.
These are important issues to be aware of before you jump on the Facebook groups and Twitter accounts that go “viral”. Most of the engagement is superfluous and has zero relevance in the real world.
Social Media has crept in the public consciousness with its own terminology of “lies/influencers/followers” etc. They attempt to mimic the human interactions in the real life, but fuel paranoia and disengagement instead – by being a major cause of anxiety. Therefore, it is no surprise that getting Facebook likes or Twitter followers is totally another business that operates on the fringes that has become commoditised.
RadOncNotes 