After Facebook launched a campaign to clear up fake accounts, many KOL (key opinion leaders) have suffered as the number of interactions has sharply decreased.
“All the like packages I sold to new stars last week could not activate and I have to refund money to sellers, totaling tens of million of dong,” complained K. Huy, who specializes in providing ‘Facebook make-up service’.
Not only Huy, but all the virtual nick systems which provide fake interactions on Facebook did not work last week.
According to Huy, on December 13, Facebook logged out many suspected accounts in Vietnam.
With the move, access tokens no longer exist. Tokens are collected by service providers when users run third-party apps. As all tokens have been lost, Facebook make-up service providers cannot control accounts and ‘order’ the accounts to give ‘likes’.
The number of interactions such as likes, comments and video watching, is one of the indicators that measure the value of celebrities. It is also a figure that business brands will refer to when paying for advertisements. The higher number of interactions that KOLs have, the more famous they are.
In many cases, some video clips posted on Facebook personal pages have the number of views that are only 25 percent of the number of likes. This means that at least 75 percent of likes are fake.
“Brands and advertisers all know about the make-up service. However, they have their own solutions to measure the real numbers of interactions,” said Thanh Hung in Tan Binh district, an ad service provider.
T.N, 24, is a fitness trainer in HCM City. She also sometimes advertises for functional food shops that target bodybuilders. Her real number of interactions is 400-700 for each post.
T.N admitted that to embellish the personal page, she bought a fake like package from a service provider (VND3 million for each post which has 300 likes at least). On average, she has 10-20 posts each day.
However, she complained that the service was interrupted recently and that service providers said the system was in maintenance.
The move taken by Facebook shows its efforts to eliminate fake accounts and interactions. However, it has affected authentic accounts as well.
Some Facebook users complained that they could not give likes and make comments for seven days. Facebook explained that the social network had discovered unusual activities of the accounts.
Binh Minh in Go Vap district complained that errors have occurred on Facebook regularly for several months. His accounts often log out suddenly and some functions are inactive.
According to a report on Vietnamnet