[candiddevmike]

If they started out doing this, why wouldn't they continue to do this in the form of click fraud for advertising? Surely if they could create some minimum % of click fraud for each ad, they make more money and it would fly under the radar of their customers looking into it...

[hiccuphippo]

They don't need to do the click fraud themselves they only need to not catch all of it. That's much less work.

[ses1984]

People buying ads are their real customers, users are there to be exploited.

They catch enough fraud that their customers get a positive ROI, but surely they don’t catch all of it.

[Lammy]

> People buying ads are their real customers, users are there to be exploited.

It's one level further. The global intelligence apparatus is the real customer, and they economically reward those who would build the most-surveillable and/or most-opinion-influencing products and services.

[candiddevmike]

I meant more that what is stopping platforms like Meta from generating a small-ish amount of click fraud, under the guise of the fake user framework they initially setup for kickstarting engagement, to juice their revenue.