The Next Great Global Danger, Clickfarms and Bots

You probably heard of the David Hogg story, he is a student who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. There was a story where he was "exposed" as a crisis actor and he was not really a student attending the school. What if I told you, that article was phony? Well, it was and to make it worse it was a story that was fueled through the use of Russian Bots and Clickfarms. That's right, Americans were made into total dummies by believing a conspiriacy that was FAKE!

Some kids were even being dealt death threats because of this story hitting the main pages of the news. Right-Wing people and even a few Left-Wing people actually brought this theory and went along commenting on posts talking about this. What they didn't know was that they were playing right into the hands of these bots.

Another thing they didn't know was that most of the views, likes, shares, and comments on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were FAKE! These bots had used clickfarms to manipulate the Edgerank of the posts so that it could make it seem more credible and have a higher organic reach to reach more "Real" people, in this case Americans.

1. What is a Clickfarm?

In case you don't know what clickfarms are, I'll tell you. Clickfarms is a type of clickfraud where a person is hired to create many fake accounts on a server to click on paid ads or post to benefit the fraud master. The fraud master is the person who hires the company to help boost his ad, post, or product page traffic pages.

Another type of clickfarm is where the fraudmaster hires low paying workers about a nickel a person to help click on links. Usually clickfarms are hired to boost likes on a business Facebook page, boost the amount of engagement on a post to help the Edgerank ranking, boost traffic on a webpage so that it ranks higher on google, or click on a ad on Google Ads to boost earnings for the master.

It's a very dirty tatic that can earn the master a good amount of money due to his ads being clicked on so many times. It can also boost the engangement of a post. While it might seem harmless, it can be used to boost posts that could turn out to be scams or worse, fake news.

You might be saying, that is really screwed up and these people are just trying to find an easy way out. You would be correct in saying that. The problem is, clickfarms are very hard to stop and because of that they have become bolder in what they actually do.

2. Anatomy of a Clickfarm/Botfarm

Before we can being to talk about how to stop clickfarms, lets take a look at how one is made and how it works. As you can see above, this is an example of a bot-generated page on Facebook. These fake accounts use the same picture, but change the details of the page in a small way to avoid being flagged as suspicious by Facebook. However, these are the same kind of accounts that help fuel the fake article about David Hogg into the front pages.

Then they use these accounts to perform the service as deemed by the fraudmaster. So if you get those services that promise 1,000 followers for $10 or 10,000 YouTube views for $50, you are hiring what is essentially a clickfarm. Most of the time these "bots" do nothing but like a page or retweet a post.

The problem becomes that because a post or page seems important due to the "amount" of engagement. Notice the quotation marks around amount, a post can have over 100,000 likes, comments, and shares to make it seem it's a subject people want to pay attention to or a post that is really important. These people begin to head to the post, engage with it more, and believe the story without knowing that the post is probably fake along with the engagement.

Clickfarms are realtively cheap to hire and as a result they are tempting to purchase to help boost a page or post. In fact, clickfarms started in India and have spread to many third-world countries. They started around 2011-2012 and have become a multi-million dollar enterprise where Indians have made a killing out of just for "Fake Engagement".

3. Why is it hard to stop clickfarms/bots?

In the heydays, bots were created using computer programs to write scripts to help automate the process. The same went for clickfarms. However, the scammers became smarter once they found out the social media giants were finally catching on. The social media giants thought they had the problem quelled, enter the manual fake profiles.

The scammers got smarter by purchasing huge servers filled with 100+ IP Adresses capable of diverting attention away from the host location. Instead of writing programs to automate profiles, they would open fake profiles with fake address information manually so that Facebook or Twitter wouldn't flag them. They would spend days just using the fake profiles like a normal human so they would be able to pass off as a normal human being.

Or else they would hire low paying workers to open fake profiles of their own and outsource the likes from other locations to make it even harder to detect. Let's take it even a step further. They would even use something called a VPN (Virtual Private Network) A VPN is something that is used to help hide an IP Address, hide the computer behind a proxy, or "change the IP Address" by logging into a server in another location, ideally the United States.

As a result, the fake traffic becomes that much harder to stop. Although big companies are trying to tighten their automated detection systems, in many cases it's not working well. In some cases some legit profiles are being flagged and in other times the actual fake profiles are never caught until it's too late or they continue to exist under the radar.

I was talking to my father and he says we need to stop this now. While I understand his anger, as I just explained it's tougher to stop then he thinks. There are far too many layers that have to be exposed and uncovered. Most of the time before the situation heats up, the fakes either delete their accounts or simply replace them with another.

Due to the fact they are located in other countries, there is actually little the U.S. or UK can do about it. It's up to the countries themselves to expose these clickfarms.

You might ask how do I know all this. Understand that I'm a Computer Science Major in High School and I'm an expert on computers, so I know how things work.

4. The Dangers of Clickfarms

There is a serious danger as I was talking to a fellow childhood friend who is an IT expert going to college in Computer Science. He tells me that there is no way that clickfarms can be stopped and I tend to agree with him. Although he says not now, which indicates that there might be security experts that could potentially stop this. However, I want to know who these people are instead of this just being implied.

By the way his name is Danny in case you wanted to know if he was a real friend, lol. He also indicated to me that impressed me at his age of 20. Danny indicated that people are becoming more gullible these days and it's never been easier to subvert someone these days with articles with questionable content that could be totally false.

With that conversation on FB, we discussed a huge danger on the internet. These "bots" could be employed by foreign countries to spread false articles in an attempt to subvert America and other developed countries. Just look at David Hogg and how he became villainized over an article that was a total fabrication. If a group of Russian Hackers could divide America using a fabricated story, imagine what a group of talented hackers from a foreign group could do.

You have to understand despite the fact those 100,000 likes, comment, and shares could be clickfarmed. Despite that people will check the link because all they care about is the number and FB's Edgerank will rank the post really high and show it to more people. In essence, somebody with malicious intentions could spend as little as $100 and create some fake profiles. They could use these black hat techniques to spread a huge amount of infulence.

Depending on the magnitude of the story, these black hat techniques could end up changing lives or even destorying lives. Such as the kid from Florida who had to get off Facebook due to the death threats he had recieved from NRA Supporters over an article that was FAKE! Yet, many Americans were fooled into believing it.

Despite the article being fake, the fact clickfarms were used to boost engangement artifically helped boost its Edgerank and make it a top mustread story. In layman's terms, we were duped by a few Russians looking to get a few laughs at our expense. You know what, they succeeded and are probably making their version of SNL as they make a mockery of our ignorance.

In layman's terms the danger of bots and clickfarms is the continued and increased spread of fake news. My fear is that soon we will be living in a world where we will not be able to trust what we watch in the news. Even though it might be real, but because of the media's bad repuation we'll refuse to believe it, believing that it's just another fake article.

Yes of course there is the matter of unethical authors using clickfarms to steal money out of the Kindle Unlimited pot. However, this new low in American history makes robbing Amazon look like child's play. Why rob Amazon, when you could spread fake news and get dumb Americans to believe it. Seems like the Russians are having a good time with it, but until somebody really gets hurt nothing will be done. Not to mention this is really low of them to use such a tragedy for their own personal gain.

With the fact there is easy access to clickfarms and bots, one person could essentially destroy someone's life by posting fabricated stories about them and using clickfarms to make it look like the whole world knows about it. People the internet has been compromised!

5. What is the real danger then?

Stop thinking clickfarms are just an attempt by unethical business people to boost their rankings and make a quick buck. There is a much darker side to this clickfraud, one that could prove toxic to our way of living.

We could soon be living in a world where everything that surrounds us is pseudo or a total sham. Society could turn into a dog eat dog world where people no longer trust each other and where the world "trust" could be a word of the past.

There is not much we can do, but before clicking on an article and beleiving it 100%, do your homework. Fact-check the article and make sure everything matches up with the facts. Although, the scammers could start finding ways around that as well.

The lesson here is that as much as we're worried about guns, clickfarms and bots might be two things we have to worry about more. After all, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Plus, nothing's worse that a society of people who are ignorant and have been brainwashed by stories that are nothing but shams.

Please share with your friends and educate yourself on these forms of clickfraud. Also, do not accept friend requests from people who look fake to you. If they look fake that's probably because they are.

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