The ‘Likes’ farms of Bangladesh

The social media giant – Facebook has a user base equivalent to China’s population and more than a billion users log in to Facebook daily. With these numbers, Facebook reported an advertising revenue, of $17.08 billion for the year 2014-15.

Such a scale of users obviously needs measurement metrics and the phenomenon of Facebook ‘likes’ was adopted by other social media platforms such as Twitter (as recently as 2015), Instagram, etc.

However, with any metric comes the ability to manipulate it in a way to show favourable results. The Intercept, in its latest report focuses on the underbelly of social media metric of ‘Likes’ also known as click farms. Filmmaker Garrett Bradley travels to Dhaka, Bangladesh – this South Asian country is credited to generate anything between 30% to 40% of Likes on Facebook.

David Sendroff, the chief executive of Forensiq, a US company that specializes in identifying fake internet traffic on behalf of advertisers, estimated that the market for false traffic was worth up to $600 million per year and was growing at 20% per year.

Reports on the internet equate the ‘Likes’ market of Dhaka to the garment sweat shops that Bangladesh has become famous for. But, the film by Bradley shows how an educated, aspirational generation is using the world’s obsession with social media to fund their own dreams.