A black market for upvotes and likes

Abstract

This article investigates controversial online marketing techniques that involve buying hundreds or even thousands of fake social media items, such as likes on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers, Reddit upvotes, mailing list subscriptions, and YouTube subscribers and likes. The findings presented here are based on an analysis of 7,426 "campaigns" posted on the crowdsourcing platform microworkers.com over a 365 day (i.e., year-long) period. These campaigns contained a combined 1,856,316 microtasks with a net budget of USD 208,466.