Mentioned in this article Games: Dota 2 Teams: Fnatic, Mineski

The second we gathered the data for today’s “LCS Facebook Followers per Country” report, it became obvious, that the exceptional amount of Filipino followers would raise a red flag. The Philippines has a reputation for click-farming, and as such, has been in the center of debates about Facebook fraud time and time again.

To be fair, the Philippines, with its roughly 100 million inhabitants, has a sizable esports scene, including the famous Dota 2 team Mineski or CLG’s League of Legends player Jake “Xmithie” Puchero. Filipino esports organizations frequently field teams for the Garena Pro League.

But that’s not enough to account for the fact that about ten per cent of all LCS Facebook followers come from the Philippines. In fact, among the top three countries in our report, not even one has its very own league, and none have ever been a stop for Worlds or All-Stars.

What does this mean?

There’s a few assertions that need to be made right off the bat. Firstly, League is the most popular esport, and the LCS is one of the most-viewed and followed esports leagues on the planet. While some teams do compete in other titles, like Fnatic, the size of the the fan base for those other titles can be assumed to be dwarfed by the fans for the team’s LCS squad.

There’s also a relatively even usage of Facebook throughout the world, which means outside of culturally specific social media platforms like Weibo, most people that watch and care about the LCS are also using Facebook. Facebook is also the most popular social media platform throughout North America and Europe.

All that said, the fact that LCS teams have such high Filipino followings can only mean two things:

LCS teams’ fanbases are primarily Filipino. Something else is going on

Yeah… I’m gonna go with the second one.

What’s really going on here?

Yes, LCS teams have massive Filipino follower numbers… but there’s no easy way of knowing whether those followers are real people. Fake accounts have been a plague upon esports for a long time, whether it’s in social media or to boost stream viewers. In fact, it’s become so much of a problem that Twitch announced plans last month to take “public legal action against seven of the most active sellers of viewbot services.”

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]You didn’t hear it here first: you can pay money to get likes and followers.[/perfectpullquote]

It’s also no secret that fake social media accounts are very common on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. This is something much bigger than just a problem for esports, it’s a big battle for every online company, from sports to fashion to commerce to media, and of course, politics. Everybody wants a high number of likes and followers—it’s what drives engagement, and from there, revenue from advertising. The biggest names make the most money, because they have the highest number of people watching.

It’s unfortunate, then, that this process can be cheated. You didn’t hear it here first: you can pay money to get likes and followers. And those followers will even engage with your content, for a time. But it’s all fake—and if your massive amount of followers don’t bring the kind of engagement that advertisers and sponsors want, they might pull out. And if it goes public that you use fake accounts, even as a rumor… well, we all know what happened to OnGamers.

Connecting the dots here is easy, right? LCS teams have a majority of followers based in the Philippines. The Philippines is home to a massive amount of “click farms,” companies that specialize in selling likes and followers.

So… LCS teams are paying for likes and followers? Well, that’s not the full story either.

“Click farms” and faking legitimacy

Fake users and engagement on Facebook and other social media platforms is a lot more complex than it may seem at first. As researched by Derek Muller at Veritasium, anytime you use paid advertising on social media platforms, these click farms will engage—even if they aren’t making money.

“In order to avoid detection by Facebook’s fraud algorithms, [click farms] like pages other than the ones they’ve been paid for, in order to seem more genuine.”

What’s worse, these fake click farm accounts will never engage with those that used legitimate advertising—which means that you can actually lose engagement by advertising, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, because Facebook shares only high-engagement posts. At that point, the only way to boost engagement is to pay for it in the form of fake likes and followers. Check out the full video for more, it’s fascinating stuff.

Guilty, even if innocent

Fnatic is one of the biggest esports brands, and has a massive 2.5 million likes. Per Likescheck.com, the largest country to like Fnatic’s page is, which comes at no surprise at this point, the Philippines. So we reached out to Fnatic’s CEO, Wouter Sleijffers, for his opinion on the report and situation.

Sleijffers had a clear statement to make: “We never bought followers and we’ve never used the Facebook promotion feature either.” To back it up, he shared Fnatic’s Facebook analytics from April 2015 to date.

“Our like count has been growing steadily and consistently, with very few ‘jumps’ which would have suggested buying. If you drill into a couple of the peaks like mid 2015 in the chart, you can see that most of the likes come from page suggestions, which is something we can’t game. And if we were paying for users, then there wouldn’t be a spike in page suggestion based likes at the same time as on your page likes. We have done some social competitions like Gleam etc… which do sometimes cause bumps, but that’s about it. Finally, note that we also have a massive Dota 2 audience in Philippines with our Dota 2 team, which works through to our partnership with Dafabet whom have SEA as one of their core markets.”

Fnatic are resolute that it hasn’t bought likes or followers, not even using legitimate paid options through Facebook.

Still, it’s almost a guarantee that Fnatic, as well as every other esports brand, has fake accounts lining its social media accounts, even if only a little, and even if those brands never tried paid advertising. In order to fool Facebook’s fraud detectors, click farms assuredly sought out popular pages to like, and they’ve bound to come across esports, especially with the industry headlining major news globally.

A blog post from Digital Strategy Consulting, dating back to Feb. 24, 2014, sums it up pointedly:

“The consequence for brands is that they waste advertising money on likes from fake profiles, and they don’t really know what their reach is and their engagement data is completely meaningless because those fake profiles never bother to engage with any brand posting.”

And even if no money was paid at all—as the Fnatic case shows—a certain amount of fake followers can become a major problem. Esports brands are building their business cases on reach and influence. Their social media following is an integral part of every sponsorship sales pitch, for example. Although, there are many ways to grow natural likes and followers throughout the different social media channels and, by no means is it impossible for a successful brand to build a huge and loyal fan base. It’s a shame, though, that those who actively pay for ill-gotten followers are difficult to distinguish from those whose following is mostly legitimate.

The lesson is, it’s not all roses. Esports is an industry which is heavily reliant on all kinds of audience metrics. In a clutter of numbers it’s easy to be fooled and troublesome to pay attention. It’s worth to go the extra mile, though, because sooner or later the scammers get caught.