Sarah Dobbs investigates what's going on when a seemingly innocuous post attracts thousands of likes...
Quick, name a Facebook scam someone on your friends list fell for today. Got one? By now, most people have wised up to messages from foreign princes who just need your bank details to help them transfer their millions into the country. And most of us have also figured out that any app that claims it'll show you who's clicking on your Facebook account and reveal friends with secret crushes on you is actually just malware.
But there's a weird phenomenon that's clogging up our Facebook feeds at the moment, propagated mostly by less savvy Facebook users. We're talking about those bizarre games or challenges that ask Facebook users to answer easy questions, claiming that they're difficult and that 'most people' will fail them. Examples doing the rounds include questions like 'name a band without the letter T in their name' or simple maths problems. Originally posted by someone you've never heard of, you'll see graphics or posts shared into your timeline, with one of your friends gleefully showing off their intelligence by answering the question that supposedly no one can.
A similar, though not exactly identical, kind of dodgy meme involves a picture that comes with instructions - generally, a photograph of a woman with numbered instructions that involve either pressing something on your phone or typing a word as a comment and then waiting for something to happen. Exactly what's going to happen usually isn't specified, beyond the fact that you won't believe it. But if you've ever given in to curiosity and followed the instructions, you'll have discovered that nothing happens, except that the post in question gets hundreds of comments. Sometimes, the post is even simpler than that: there won't be a question or instructions, just a request to Like something really obvious. Ever seen someone engaging with a post that's just a picture of a kitten that says 'Like if you love cats'? Or 'Like if you're not racist'? Or even, 'Like if you hate cancer'? Yeah, those are all examples of the kind of thing that we're talking about here.
So what are these things? Well, sometimes they might just be a bit of fun. Sometimes, they might just be something daft someone made to see how far it could spread and how gullible people can be. But more often than not, they're something a lot sneakier and a bit more sinister.
They Want Your Likes
Basically, it all comes down to gaming Facebook's algorithms via Like farming. To understand why it happens, you need to understand how Facebook treats pages. Over the last few years, the social network has shuffled and reshuffled the way it displays content. You'll probably already be aware of that fact that your News Feed doesn't just show you what your friends and Liked pages have posted, in chronological order. By default, it shows you what it deems to be Top Stories, in the order it thinks you'll be most likely to engage with it, and some posts, even by pages you've subscribed to, will never appear in your feed at all.
That's a minor irritant for you, but for brands, it's a major headache. Facebook has become one of the main ways a brand can reach its intended audience, to the point where it's almost weird if a brand doesn't have a Facebook page. But just having thousands or even millions of Likes on Facebook doesn't necessarily mean much if Facebook isn’t letting those people see your posts. By way of example, one page I manage has over 800,000 Likes, but some posts only get seen by around 10,000 of those people, while others have a reach of over 200,000. Partly, that's because some content gets shared by more people, but partly it's down to those pesky algorithms that decide who gets to see what content.
The actual mathematics behind the algorithm are known only to Facebook, in much the same way as no one knows exactly how Google decides which sites should appear where in its search results. What we do know is that Facebook uses machine learning to constantly tweak and improve its rankings - and that an awful lot of different things are taken into account, like how many people have Liked a post, how many people have hidden it, how many have commented, as well as how many times you personally have interacted with a page or with a type of content in the past.
Different factors are given different weights, but in the end, it comes down to the fact that the more you interact with someone or something on Facebook, the more you're going to see posts from them in future. And that means the system is open to abuse.
Facebook Farming
To some extent, all brands try to use that to their advantage. It's why they run competitions on their pages where you have to leave a comment to enter, or why they ask apparently throwaway questions to their followers; that kind of engagement means their future posts, like posts about sales or new products, will get more traction.
But Like farmers aren't trying to promote their page as it currently exists. They don't care if you like puppies; they're just scammers who are trying to drive up the page's popularity so they can then sell the page on to someone else, who'll change the info and start promoting whatever it is they really want to sell. By Liking a post or the page it came from, you're opening yourself up to more promotion from whoever happens to buy the page.
In the age of internet advertising, where everything you do online leads to increasingly targeted ads following you around the web, that might not sound all that terrifying. But it's not likely to be a legitimate retailer who buys the farmed page - most of those can collect Likes by themselves and won't want to risk getting involved in the shady world of selling Facebook Pages. It's totally against Facebook's rules to sell a page, and if they get wind of it, the page will be removed. So the kind of business you'll find buying farmed pages will be the kind that wants to sell you cheap off-brand pharmaceutical drugs, cheap gold, cheap knock-offs of designer clothes... Or just steal your money and sell you nothing at all.
Not the kind of thing you want clogging up your feed, then.
Even More Sinister
Most of the posts you’ll see from Like farmers are fairly harmless in and of themselves. No one particularly minds seeing a picture of a kitten, for example, and being taunted by ridiculously easy trivia questions might be irritating, but it's pretty easy to ignore. Sometimes, though, in their never-ending quest for more engagement, the farmers will go one step further and start using images of sick or dying animals or children as part of their strategy.
Obviously, that's not particularly pleasant for you, because when you're skimming Facebook over your morning coffee, you probably don't want to see pictures of dead animals or be reminded of your own mortality. But it's particularly grim when you consider that those images have usually been stolen. So while the posts purport to be sympathetic, asking Facebook users to Like or comment as a gesture of goodwill or love towards the person or animal who's suffering, they're actually being remarkably cynical, banking on the empathy of others while they're really exploiting very real pain.
It's hard to imagine how much it must hurt and enrage someone to find that a picture of their child has been stolen to profit scammers. Journalist Courtney Westlake experienced it first-hand when a photo of her daughter was used by a Like farmer and ended up getting shared more than 23,000 times across Facebook. Her child, Brenna, suffers from a rare skin disorder, and the post in question asked people to comment 'Amen' as a prayer for her to be healed-all without her parents' knowledge or consent. Most of the people who shared it probably had the best intentions, but ultimately, they were just playing into the hands of a cybercriminal.
Just Don't Click
The whole thing is rather sordid and sad, but it's easy to fall for. It can be especially difficult to detect whether a post is legitimate or not, because these Like farmers are using the same techniques that genuine companies and people often use to grab a bit of the Facebook action for themselves. Some SEO blogs even recommend posting the very same sort of stupid questions ('name a fish without the letter A in its name!' etc.) that the scammers use, so it can be hard to know if you're dealing with someone with malicious intentions or just someone who's been given a bit of bad advice.
Then again, if a legitimate brand is posting mindless content like that, there's still no need to encourage them by clicking on it. The easiest way to avoid encouraging either scammers or crap social media managers is to only engage with Facebook posts that have some kind of worthwhile content. There's no need to prove that you can name a trout, or add up, or that you don't like cancer on your Facebook page - if you see one of these posts, you can just keep scrolling.
(Even comments pointing out that they're stupid or dodgy count as engagement, after all, so it's better to just ignore them. Or you could click to hide them, if you want to help Facebook's algorithms to filter this stuff out.)
And while Facebook's secret algorithms might seem annoying, because they mean you don't always get to see posts by people and brands you actually like, and that promoting your own stuff is harder, there is an upside: those very same algorithms are working to filter out as much of this junk as possible, and as they learn to identity this kind of content more reliably, it's likely that these scams will start to disappear completely.
Of course, then the scammers will just come up with a different way of trying to trick people into parting with their money. But we'll eventually all get wise to that too...
Why 'Raising Awareness' Doesn't Work
Ever had a day where all the women in your Facebook feed seem to have gone collectively insane, posting inane status updates that just say 'Black' or 'On the kitchen counter'? Or where everyone suddenly seemed to be posting nonsense status updates, usually with a number attached?
Those are all part of a weird trend for Facebook chain posts. Usually, they pretend to be part of a charity appeal: the colours one, for example, is usually related to bra strap colour, and anyone who Likes the post will get a message from the poster telling them that they now have to get involved, by posting their own cryptic status and passing it on, supposedly to raise awareness of breast cancer. The other, similar games have their own elaborate rules and tenuous connections to charity appeals.
But as you'll have already worked out, they don't work. They don't do anything to raise awareness of any charity's work, and they also tend not to encourage anyone to actually donate. In the end, they're just more detritus clogging up the Facebook landscape, not doing anyone any good.
Facebook can be a great platform for raising awareness of good causes, though, and it can help charities to raise money - but just posting weird messages or hitting Like, won't do anything at all. It's all very well to click to offer 'support', but if you want to really support a cause, you'll need to open your wallet.
Other Facebook Scams To Watch Out For
You probably haven't seen a scam email land in your inbox for years, especially if you use Gmail, because most email programs are now well equipped to filter them out and direct them straight to your spam box. That's great. The problem is, scammers have just moved on to other platforms to try to part you from your money. Here are some scams known to be circulating on Facebook:
Clickbait headlines
You won't believe what happens next! Actually, maybe you will. While some clickbait headlines are from legit sources who just really want you to visit their websites, some of them are more sinister, leading to pages infected with malware. Sometimes they'll ask you to re-enter your Facebook username and password to see the content, or ask you to download software to play a video. If you do, you'll find yourself hacked or with a nasty virus on your computer.
Quizzes
What animal are you? An endangered one, if you fall for some of the sneaky quiz apps that float around Facebook. They might seem innocuous, but to take these personality quizzes, you'll have to give the app permission to access your Facebook account or otherwise enter your personal information, which could see you become a target for fraud down the line.
Extra features
Want to change the colour of your Facebook page? Or use a Dislike button? Well, you can't, but scammers are keen to offer you things like that in the hope that you'll install the bit of code they'll send you. It's a virus. Don't do it.
Free giveaways
Could you win a free iPad, holiday or tickets to a festival just by clicking through to another page? Almost certainly not. Again, this is a scam that attempts to play on Facebook users' desires, offering them something great if only they'll do something first... That might be filling in surveys (which ask for personal details), installing software (malware) or even sending a small sum of money to the scammer in order to claim a reward.
One particularly enterprising scammer recently claimed to be running a Total Wipeout Tour, which people could sign up to attend through Facebook - but it didn't exist and was just a data mining exercise.
There are a lot of different ways scammers will try to abuse your trust, including hacking your friends' profiles to send out their dodgy messages, and because it's Facebook, it's easy to fall for it. Be as sceptical about things on Facebook as you would via email or over the phone. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is; if someone wants access to your info, it's almost certainly not for a good reason.