VIA: Last month, while wasting a few moments on Facebook, my pal Brendan O’Malley was surprised to see that his old friend Alex Gomez had “liked” Discover. This was surprising not only because Alex hated mega-corporations but even more so because Alex had passed away six months earlier.
The Facebook “like” is dated Nov. 1, which is strange since Alex “passed [away] around March 26 or March 27,” O’Malley told me. Worse, O’Malley says the like was “quite offensive” since his friend “hated corporate bullshit.”
Here's a screenshot:
Brendan sent me this info in response to a request I had made on Facebook to my friends. Not long ago I asked people to send me screenshots of weird or suspicious behavior. I did this after noticing some bizarre things happening on Facebook —such as friends of mine showing up as “liking” things that I know they don’t like, such as liberals “liking” Mitt Romney and a guy with no car who "liked" Subaru.
When I contacted these people they swore they had never liked these brands, and they had no idea that this stuff was going out under their names.
So what is going on?
The Mystery Of The Unintended Likes
Full disclosure: I’m an active Facebook user, and I really enjoy it. I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends and family who are scattered across the country and world. I also use Facebook to promote the arts magazine I publish, Sensitive Skin.
The first sign I saw that something was not quite right was that after I’d spent a lot of time getting people to “like” the Sensitive Skin page, fewer and fewer people were seeing my posts.
More people had been seeing my posts six months earlier, last winter, when I only had 800 likes, than this past summer, when I had more than 2,000.
Then I heard about Facebook’s latest idea, getting users to pay to “promote” our own posts, so that more people would see them.
Many people find promoted posts egregious, and the blowback has been well documented. A site called Dangerous Minds called promoted posts “the biggest bait and switch in history.” Mark Cuban complained in an article on The Huffington Post and made the same case here on ReadWrite.
Nevertheless, in August I decided to give Sponsored Posts a try to promote Sensitive Skin. That’s when the weirdness began.
Strange Results From Sponsored Posts
My number of post views did indeed go up, according the statistics provided to me by Facebook. But these likes didn’t seem like “quality” views or likes. I was getting likes from folks in South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Comments were posted not only in languages I couldn’t understand, but in alphabets I didn’t recognize.
This was suboptimal — not to mention extremely weird — for a literary magazine written in English.
Then I started noticing something else. “Sponsored Posts” were popping up near the top of my newsfeed, and some of them made no sense.
A number of my liberal friends supposedly had “liked” Mitt Romney, for instance. And my friend Nicolala, a high school English teacher from San Francisco, had “liked” WalMart.
I started tracking these unlikely likes, taking screenshots and following up with IMs to my friends. I asked Nicolala if she had indeed “liked” Walmart, and her answer was succinct:
I found it odd that my friend E.V. Grieve, who writes an anti-gentrification blog about New York’s East Village, would “like” Subaru.
No comments:
Post a Comment