Click farms jeopardize the existential foundation of social media: the idea that the interactions on it are between real people.

The Philippines has the highest rate of unemployment in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Casipong is aware of the alternative employment options: Cebu City is the “cybersex capital of the Philippines,” and illegal firework factories in the slums announce their presence every few weeks with a bang. Braggs’s employees seem genuinely happy; their main complaint was laggy Internet that disrupted the music they streamed while working. Many spoke of Braggs as a Horatio Alger–style role model. In the fictionalized biography Braggs maintains on the website of his account farm, he calls himself the Robin Hood of Facebook marketing, and this contrarian idealism extends to his general attitude about life. His hero is the tribal chieftain Lapu-Lapu—the namesake of his city—famous for slaying the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who, in the name of capitalism and colonialism, was the first man to circumnavigate the globe. He has no desire to stay up all night answering questions about credit cards and Windows glitches for people on the other side of the world. Why shouldn’t he feel proud of providing decent salaries to 17 workers, or paying for the school fees of his girlfriend’s younger sister or the local kids’ basketball jerseys? He’s a self-made man, trained on YouTube tutorials and in chat rooms; to this day, he types hunt-and-peck style, never having learned QWERTY.

What he and click-farm managers are doing is not illegal in the Philippines. Facebook’s terms of service are not international law. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from several states have legislated against fake reviews—false endorsements on Amazon, for example. But no formal ruling has been passed down on inauthentic likes. “Click farming raises serious consumer protection questions,” said Ian Ayres, a specialist in contract law and a professor at Yale’s law and business schools. “To participate as a buyer or a seller in the traditional click-farming market seems a clear wrong.” But the actual law is less explicit. And Braggs has his own business ethics: He’s not hacking anyone’s bank account, only offering a service that people are clamoring to pay for and providing for himself, his family, and his countrymen.

For years, Facebook encouraged brands to use social media as a free way to connect with fans. Companies would post content, and Facebook would show it to a large percentage of the people who had liked those companies, free of charge: This was the so-called organic reach of a post. But, over the last few years, with a noticeably precipitous drop in late 2013, Facebook has steadily decreased the organic reach of posts; now, when a company posts something, it only reaches about 6 percent of the profiles that have already liked that company, and Facebook plans to decrease that reach further. This has meant that companies struggle to access most of the fans they have accumulated unless they pay Facebook to advertise. But as Facebook becomes more of a paid billboard, click-farm bots can disrupt the efforts of companies that advertise with Facebook—and, sometimes, even render them pointless.

Here’s how this can happen. Second Floor Music, an independent, Manhattan-based jazz publishing company that represents critically acclaimed but lesser-known composers, was the kind of small business built on its history and reputation: Five Grammy certificates hung on the walls, and jazz legends and up-and-comers dropped by the studio to rehearse. It was not, however, exactly forward-leaning when it came to social media marketing. But it was also ideally positioned to take advantage of Facebook’s advertising services: Its products targeted a niche audience that was often hard to reach, but which Facebook, with its vast trove of personal data, could easily access.