The click farm (in Italian “click factories”) are organizations capable of generating hundreds of interactions on social media in a very short time, between views and comments or even reviews and clicks on advertising banners, using bot or through the work of real people who carry out these interactions by operating hundreds of cell phones essentially “selling” clicks and interactions. These structures can be physical or virtual and are found mainly in Asian countries such as China, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Thailand. Right here in 2017 a click farm was discovered that used approximately 350,000 SIM cards. These organizations can generate considerable profits by “selling” likes and followers, and their legality is at best dubious.
How Click Farms Work
By searching on the internet for “buy followers” or “buy likes” – that is, buy followers or likes – you can easily find many sites that sell real interaction packages: likes, views and more. The numbers vary based on the number of interactions requested and the purpose is precisely to raise your profile numbers. Obviously these are not spontaneous interactions but rather those generated ad hoc following a payment.
This is possible thanks to click farms, which are groups of people who use large quantities of phones to carry out these interactions. You can buy views, likes, comments, followers but also clicks on advertisements or reviews. In fact, click farms can act not only on social media but also on e-commerce – that is, on sites that sell online – with the aim of creating a good reputation for the products on sale, an obviously fictitious reputation. The literal translation of click farm is “click farm” which in itself already makes you think of a place where clicks are produced, but the term probably comes from “farming”, a term related to the world of video games: it indicates when a player repeatedly performs the same action to accumulate resources or some benefit for the purposes of the game.
To create a click farm you don’t need specific skills, all you need is: lots of phones, lots of chargers and lots of SIM cards and someone to use them. Each phone is always connected to the power supply to stay in operation and has its own SIM to be able to create profiles to be used on various social networks. Click farms can vary greatly in size, from tens of phones up to hundreds or thousands of unitswhich are aligned on panels to be quickly accessible. Operation can also vary: the phones can be manually operatedthat is, interactions such as views or likes are made directly on the individual phone. But now, social media is also very widespread box farm. To make them, you take about ten phones, remove the screen and battery to consume less electricity and put them in some kind of boxes. From there, they are connected to a PC where programs are installed that allow you to operate the various phones at the same time, without having to use them individually. Thanks to this system, a person, alone, can manage hundreds and hundreds of phones quickly.
Are they legal?
At this point the question arises: are click farms legal? The answer, strangely enough, is not a firm no. Click farms operate in a grey area of legislation that regulates web browsing and the use of social media. It depends on the country and what the laws are, but building a click farm is not illegal in itself and you always have to evaluate in concrete terms what the individual click farm is doing and how. In China Since 2020, using click farms for commercial purposes is prohibitedbut activities of this type are widespread in many countries of the Southeast Asiawhere there are no laws to combat the phenomenon. That said, all the Social platforms discourage the use of these methods to optimize the performance of their profiles and try to penalize people who use it, clearly considering it a dishonest commercial method. However, it is not easy to recognize when the interactions are real or come from click farms. The various social platforms are increasingly struggling to recognize paid interactions generated by click farms. And this is also thanks to the evolution of this methodology.
How Click Farms Are Managed
In the beginning, to generate clicks, mainly ads were used botthat is, automatic programs capable of performing more or less complex functions such as liking or even writing comments. Although these programs have become very sophisticated, they still have a pattern that is repeated and therefore the algorithms of the various platforms were able to recognize them and block them sooner or later, as violations of the rules of use of social media.
In the case of the click farms we described earlier, where there is a human hand at the base, the interactions have less predictable behavioral patterns: the time spent on the screen, how the wall is scrolled, how long it takes to click like or follow. These are all variables that if done by a computer are all identical and recognizable, but when it is a person using the phone, they are the same as the behavior of any other user. And so it is much more difficult for the platforms to distinguish between real and paid interactions.
How much does it cost to build a click farm?
But how much does it cost to build a click farm? The biggest expense is the phonesbut these are almost always products second hand or low qualitysince they are used only for fairly simple operations. And then they are often bought in bulk to reduce costs. Another expense is represented by the SIM cards and the pricing plans for each phone. We have no way of knowing how each individual click farm regulates this, but we know that some reduce costs by using Illegal SIMs. For example, in 2017, a click farm was discovered in Thailand that was using about 350,000 unregistered SIM cards, in order to bypass the need to pay a data plan for each phone. Incidentally, the curious thing is that when the police discovered what was happening, they arrested the people who were running the click farm, but not for the click farm, but precisely because they were using illegal SIM cards and smuggling phones.
As I was saying, click farms are not illegal in themselves because there are no international laws that prohibit buying interactions on social media. The issue changes if the equipment used is illegal, as in the case of Thailand that we were talking about now, or if we focus on the workers’ conditions. Again, it is difficult to speak for all click farms in general, but we are aware of numerous testimonials that speak of conditions of real exploitation. On average, workers are in cramped spaces, they are paid one dollar for every thousand interactions and work shifts that go well beyond eight hours. The police are able to intervene when they detect these conditions rather than the buying and selling of interactions on social media.
