Eli5: Why is it so hard for social media companies to remove spam and Bot accounts?
In: 20
They have very little incentive to do so. They make money by selling ads, and they sell ad space by showing advertisers their metrics. Everything about bot accounts pumps up their metrics, so if they were to successfully purge them (performing the majority of which isn’t as difficult as you might think), their stats would collapse.
Everyone has probably heard of that one instance when Fb claimed they had reached more teenagers in the US than there existed teenagers in the US? They probably didn’t even invent the stat, with all the bot action, they probably did see that much engagement. That’s the real issue – when companies start drinking their own koolaid.
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