When Facebook introduced the "like" button in 2009, no one could have predicted the profound impact it would have.

Key points: ' Click farms' are businesses selling fake social media engagement

Click farms' are businesses selling fake social media engagement Politicians are accused of buying fake social media followers

Politicians are accused of buying fake social media followers Tech companies are not doing enough to combat spam accounts, experts say

Every minute, Facebook's 2.3 billion users generate 4 million likes.

Now, 'likes', 'followers', and 'views' can lead to power, money and influence — but the Facebook metrics can be bought by anyone with a simple click.



In clandestine businesses known as 'click farms' spread out across the world, fake profiles, likes, shares, and views are being manufactured and sold on social media platforms to influencers, businesses, and even politicians.

But how do click farms work and how do they benefit those who pay for the services?



Bots, manual labour, and commercialised engagement



Johan Lindquist, an anthropologist at the University of Stockholm, took an interest in click farming when his research indicated an increasing number of fake followers on politicians' social media accounts.

Dr Lindquist has now conducted extensive research on these operations in Indonesia.

"[In Indonesia] there's a lot of digital competence but not a lot of work opportunities, so I started to look around and it was clear that there were a lot people selling [engagement]," he said.



Depending on who you ask, click farms are either fraudulent online businesses running a sophisticated scam, or a legitimate form of income for people seeking to exploit the digital economy.

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Dr Lindquist said some farms rely on software to generate engagement through bots, while others employ human labour to manually engage with accounts in rooms storing rows and rows of hundreds of devices — some businesses actually buy the fake engagement, and proceed to sell that on to clients.

"So imagine an Instagram follower, an account created by a bot, which is sold and then re-sold along different chains with each seller making a profit [on] the next sale," he said.



And some of them are very large, sophisticated operations.



"Imagine a room with a group of 20-year-old men around the computers who are smoking and drinking," Dr Linqduist said.

"We can imagine this kind of space not only in Indonesia but in other places around the world, perhaps in Melbourne or in Bangkok."

Dr Linqduist added that while the best click farms can make up to $70,000 a month, "most struggle, there's a lot of competition, [and] it's cut throat".



Politician accounts inundated with 'low-quality followers'

Fake Twitter followers according to analytics tool Sparktoro. ( ABC News: Jarrod Fankhauser )

A quick Google search yields dozens of websites and services offering to sell likes, views, and friends for as little as a few dollars.



Social media influencers, businesses, and even politicians have been caught up in accusations of paying for likes and followers.



The US State Department admitted in 2013 that it had paid more than $US600,000 ($847,800) for fake Facebook followers and likes in an attempt to expand its social media presence.

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But alarmingly — with crucial elections looming across Asia in coming months — many politicians appear to have unusually high numbers of fake followers.



According to the online Twitter analysis tool Sparktoro, a number of politicians appear inundated with "low-quality followers", a strong indication that they are fake.

Sparktoro defines fake followers as accounts that are "unreachable and will not see the account's tweets (either because they're spam, bots, propaganda, or because they're no longer active on Twitter)".

It revealed Indonesia's President Joko Widodo had more than 5 million low-quality followers on Twitter — in other words, 50 per cent of his follower base could be fabricated.



Thailand's Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha returns a similar score, while India's leader Narendra Modi and his opponent Rahul Ghandi both appear to both have more than 55 per cent low-quality followings.

Even here in Australia, Sparktoro shows 60 per cent of Opposition leader Bill Shorten's Twitter followers to be of low quality, while Prime Minister Scott Morrison's are roughly 30 per cent low quality.



However it should be noted that the ABC is not suggesting these politicians have paid for the followers, and in addition, Sparktoro and digital analytical tools like it do not provide definitive analysis.

In a statement to the ABC, the Prime Minister's office denied Mr Morrison has ever used a third party to obtain more social media followers.



Nonetheless journalist Brooke Binkowski, the editor of truthorfiction.com and former editor of fact-finding website snopes.com, maintains some politicians around the world are "definitely" buying engagement.



"I think politicians definitely pay for fake followers, because that gives their messaging a boost," she said.

"They probably tell themselves that it's no different to political advertising."



'Disinformation and propaganda are extremely lucrative'



Experts say the business models of social media platforms rely on the engagement. ( Brian Solin, via Wikicommons )

Ms Binkowski added that while the impact of fake engagement is difficult to measure, the scale alone is alarming.



"Disinformation and propaganda are extremely lucrative," she said.

"I mean swaying entire populations of people and monitoring crowd behaviour is something that people have been doing for a very long time."



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Despite some efforts at purging fake profiles from their platforms, Dr Lindquist says Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are ultimately unlikely to push back too hard.



"Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms actually depend on these click farmers because they depend on the traffic, and the traffic generates profit and the click farmers generate traffic," Dr Lindquist said.

Ms Binkowski agrees the business models of social media platforms rely on engagement.



"I find it pretty detestable because they could [both] make plenty of money and actually do the ethical thing," she said.

In a statement issued to the ABC, a Facebook Australia spokesperson said: "[We take] authenticity very seriously … we have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes."

Twitter also issued a statement saying they took the issue very seriously and had strengthened their guidelines and management of spam accounts.

But with 1.6 billion voters expected to head to the polls across Asia this year, just how much sway — if any at all — fake engagement will have is unclear.



Nonetheless it presents a new frontier for digital regulators, and according to Ms Binkowski, a threat to democracy.



"The nuance to this is that disinformation, propaganda, fake news, it's not just an inconvenience … it's a way to manipulate public opinion," she said.

"It's being used as an extremely cheap and extremely effective way of manipulating entire countries."