[jerf]

"The USA Today spokeswoman told CJR that they flagged the issue for Facebook after noticing an unusually large uptick in followers from the aforementioned countries. “Since we first brought this issue to Facebook’s attention, we have been in close communication with them and look forward to a swift solution that prevents this illegitimate activity from happening on our Facebook page in the future,” Maribel Wadsworth, Gannett’s chief transformation officer, told USA Today Friday."

The article suggests USA Today brought this to Facebook's attention. If USA Today had been doing this on purpose, even indirectly, that would be a bizarre move. We also have nothing from Facebook contradicting this claim.

You can hypothesize nobody asked Facebook about it or that USA Today is now lying to try to save face, but those would be hypotheses that are possible, but not currently supported by the facts. It is a reasonable interpretation that USA Today is indeed a target of some sort and not the instigator. I am also not sure exactly what the bots sought to gain from this, but I've seen enough similarly crazy things that made sense once an explanation came out that I'm willing to give some time for such an explanation to come out.

I've got no love lost for the media but they're still shining beacons of virtue compared to the people authoring and running bot networks for this sort of thing, so I don't find it that hard to trust USA Today enough to consider their version to be the most likely story. (Not the only story, but pending further data, the most likely one.)

[IAmGraydon]

Call me cynical, but I'm betting USA Today paid for millions of fake followers to pump up their stats (making them a more attractive platform for native advertising), got wind that Facebook was onto them and decided to break the story first and act like they were the ones to tell Facebook about it in the first place to save face. Nowhere else besides this woman's quote does it say that Facebook initiated their bot-destroying campaign after USA Today told them about all of their fake followers. They're lying, plain and simple.

[chuckdries]

And this is based on... what, exactly?

1. They didn't break the story, CJR did.

2. Why would they buy so many likes? In my experience, native ad sales revolve around native metrics. Buying bots to like your page (but not visit or interact with your website) won't help you there.

[IAmGraydon]

It's based on being cynical due to working in marketing for 15 years. Obviously I'm only speculating. I mentioned native ad sales because sites that engage in native marketing typically sell a package that includes posting the native content to their Facebook page, which has X number of followers. The higher that number, obviously the more attractive it is.