
A Comprehensive Study of the Flaws of the Facebook Like System [pdf] - ghosh
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.05414v2.pdf
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rshaban
Abstract: "Social networks help to bond people who share similar interests all
over the world. As a complement, the Facebook "Like" button is an efficient
tool that bonds people with the online information. People click on the "Like"
button to express their fondness of a particular piece of information and in
turn tend to visit webpages with high "Like" count. The important fact of the
Like count is that it reflects the number of actual users who "liked" this
information. However, according to our study, one can easily exploit the
defects of the "Like" button to counterfeit a high "Like" count. We provide a
proof-of-concept implementation of these exploits, and manage to generate 100
fake Likes in 5 minutes with a single account. We also reveal existing
counterfeiting techniques used by some online sellers to achieve unfair
advantage for promoting their products. To address this fake Like problem, we
study the varying patterns of Like count and propose an innovative fake Like
detection method based on clustering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our
algorithm, we collect the Like count history of more than 9,000 websites. Our
experiments successfully uncover 16 suspicious fake Like buyers that show
abnormal Like count increase patterns."

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05414](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05414)

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hanspeter
I could replicate this even with a post set to privacy level "Only me". It
seems like a weird bug, and it's very peculiar that it hasn't been fixed for
such a long time.

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wodenokoto
I'm confused. Is the original paper starting at page 3 from 2012 or 2015? The
prelude is definitely from this year, but it is unclear when the rest of the
paper is from.

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j2kun
Please submit links to the arXiv summary page when possible, not the pdf.

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golem_de
It's awesome, how much you can write about an iframe

