A group of analysts were able to purchase roughly 54,000 inauthentic social media interactions with little, if any, pushback from some of Silicon Valley's biggest names
The findings — based on analysts purchasing social media manipulation tools and then testing how the companies responded — stand in stark contrast to public statements from Facebook, Twitter and Google that claim they have all significantly clamped down on such activities since the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
That raises potentially hard questions for social media platforms as their business models rely on selling online advertising to other companies, many of which trust these firms to promote their paid-for messages to real online users, not fake accounts created merely to generate online noise. on Monday. "This year alone, we have taken down about 50 networks of what we called coordinated inauthentic behavior."To test social media companies' defenses, the Riga-based researchers spent just €300 between May and June of this year on mostly Russian social media manipulation tools that allowed them to purchase 3,500 online comments, more than 25,000 social media likes, 20,000 video views and a further 5,100 fake digital followers.
The analysts then reported some of the inauthentic behavior to the companies to gauge their response. In the past, the likes of Facebook and Twitter have been vocal about their ability to thwart such activities, often before users have reported potential abuse. Twitter, for instance, had relatively robust mechanisms in place to identify false accounts, and over half the paid-for likes and retweets bought through the online manipulation tools were removed by the company, based on the research.
On Facebook and Instagram, the photo-sharing service owned by the world's largest social network, the researchers said that both platforms ranked poorly when it came to removing false video views — a key metric for some online advertisers.
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