For those looking to artificially inflate their Facebook stats to impress people or drive sales, there’s a new alternative to begging or bribing people for “Likes.” Now you or your friends can just simply send a raft of private messages that include a link to your page, and Facebook will add +2 to your page’s “Like” count for each message.
It’s long been known that Facebook scans internal messages for spam and security risks — and that it blocks users from sending links to torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay. But Facebook has never been clear how much data-mining its doing of users’ private conversations. It turns out, at least some is provably going on.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Digits Blog, with the help of researcher Ashkan Soltani, reported on a video showing the “Like” pumping and reproduced it:
The video, which was posted this week on Hacker News, showed a person who sent links in Facebook messages in order to inflate the number of “Likes” a page had received. Each time the link was sent, the page’s “Like” count went up by two, something that the Hacker News poster said allows people to “pump up to 1,800 ‘Likes’ in an hour.”
In addition to raising privacy questions, then, the video points to potential problems with “Like fraud.”
“If [you’re] visiting an online store and you see a lot of likes under the product then this might cloud your judgement,” one commenter wrote.
The video has since been taken down for violating YouTube’s restrictions on the depiction of “harmful activities,” but the behavior was also confirmed and recorded by Digits. There’s also a page that you can use to test this yourself. As of this afternoon, sending this link in a Facebook message boosted the “Like” count by two each time.
That’s a pretty great little hack, but evidently, it’s not a bug. It’s something actually noted in the documentation for developers.
Still, faked stats are better in my book than the bought ones – where companies give discounts or hide music/videos behind a ‘Like’ wall. But given that Facebook is now letting brands and even people pay to flood their messages onto others’ walls, it’s way too late to be crying that Facebook is supposed to be a genuine social space.
Update: Facebook’s PR firm writes in to add comment:
