Click farms

What are they and why do they matter?

A post by Julia Antunes and Rebecca Coleman

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

We live in a period of history where part of the profits and opportunities lie in what we know as the platform economy. Social media is one example of this. Several companies have emerged and grown exponentially over the last decade within this market, and it is hard to imagine our daily routines – whether personal or work-related – without some influence from them.

In this market, there is a specific currency of exchange: engagement. And around this, new questions arise. In the quest for genuine engagement, influencers, companies, celebrities and even politicians hire people to view, ‘like’ and comment on their social media posts. The reason is simple: in the advertising sector, engagement from real people is worth more than that from bots.

Around this activity, so-called ‘click farms’ are emerging, whose business model is to offer services to boost the number of ‘likes’. These farms hire people to spend long hours engaging with various social media content, paying very little for each interaction. In countries where unemployment rates are high, there is a large supply of unskilled labour – a goldmine for click farms.

The coronavirus pandemic has severely exacerbated the situation, as many people have been affected by corporate spending cuts. Due to Covid, and consequently the economic crisis, many workers have found themselves out of work and forced to resort to exploitative working conditions.

According to Professor Rafael Gohmann, “Click farm platforms are the deep web of platform labour”, meaning that these services engage in unfair practices towards their employees. “Many of these workers decide to join the platforms, attracted by the prospect of a relatively easy job, and often find themselves frustrated by both low pay and deadlocks and a lack of tasks”, argues Professor Rafael.

The consequences of click farms

Whilst for some, click farms offer their only chance of earning an income, these seemingly easy jobs come with many obstacles and setbacks. Employees work long hours in an attempt to earn enough to live on, only to have their activities blocked due to social media regulations. The click farms take no responsibility for this, regularly leaving workers without work or pay.

To keep up with demand, employees often outsource tasks to bots. Not only does this run counter to the very concept of a click farm, it also increases the number of bots. Furthermore, a parallel market for buying and selling bots and fake accounts – at prices as low as R$ 1.50 (0.18 euro) – competes with the click farm workers. These extremely low prices take work away from the click farms, leaving workers who are already desperate without a job. Some platforms even create their own bots to profit and take control of the parallel market.

These issues highlight the potential risks for disadvantaged click farm workers, as well as the problems other internet users face in these circumstances. These concerns call into question the legality and ethics of these click farms.

Regulations and ethics

Despite having grown exponentially over the last 15 years, social media remains relatively unregulated. Between 2010 and 2012, teams of internet security researchers and law enforcement officers dismantled several spambots across the world. This data highlights the scale of the problem, which has only grown since then. In the US, laws prohibit certain activities such as fake reviews, but there are no explicit laws against inauthentic ‘likes’, ‘follows’ or ‘shares’. However, practices such as these tend to take place in less developed countries, where these activities are not illegal.

Despite the lack of regulation, experts question the ethics of click farms. Not only do employees have to work long hours for an unfair wage, but the social media users who pay for these services gain an unfair advantage over organic engagement and usually profit from these practices. What do you think – would click farms be ethical if they paid their workers well?

References

Clark, D B., (2015). How click farms have inflated social media currency. In The Bot Bubble. https://newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency

Click Farm Platforms: how they work. (6 July 2021). Digi Labour. https://digilabour.com.br/click-farm-platforms-how-they-work/

Cox, J. (5 August 2019). DIY click farms in the US. https://www.vice.com/pt/article/d3naek/as-fazendas-de-cliques-faca-voce-mesmo-dos-eua

What are click farm platforms and why do they matter? (n.d.). Nexo Jornal. https://pp.nexojornal.com.br/ponto-de-vista/2021/O-que-s%C3%A3o-plataformas-de-fazendas-de-clique-e-por-que-elas-importam

Parks, L. (2019). Dirty Data: Content Moderation, Regulatory Outsourcing, and The Cleaners. Film Quarterly, 73(1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2019.73.1.11