They reported the unexpected activity from foreign countries to Facebook themselves. I don't think they were in on it.
> The purge of such accounts culminated a six-month effort by Facebook to combat the scam, which routed faux profiles through Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
> ...
> 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.
When sites pay other services to increase their fb likes, they are always from other countries for some reason. Because in this case the payer only wants to see the actual like count go up.
A lot of people seem to think that setting up a botnet is difficult, and it's very surprising when you decide to research and actually do it. It's ridiculously easy. You can rent out established botnets with almost no effort, and if you can run payloads on compromised internet-enabled devices, you can set up your own and coordinate it without much fuss.
This is a big problem that no one really knows how to solve.
I wonder if there's a way to build a bot net that takes down other bot nets. Basically, create a feedback loop such that the decreasing price of a bot net leads to some action that drives the price back up.
I mean, look at the shenanigans Wells Fargo gets caught up in, which are worse than "buying likes" bot activity. Is it that unbelievable some manager with a bonus tied up in vanity metrics would use bots to boost them?
> The purge of such accounts culminated a six-month effort by Facebook to combat the scam, which routed faux profiles through Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
> ...
> 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.