Or do the companies doing the advertising have people creating hundreds of fake profiles?
The latest thing constantly popping up on my Facebook is some junk called “Crystal Clear Memories”. It’s a square piece of clear glass or plastic with a picture of your dead pet or grandma or whatever etched into it. And then there will be 287 comments almost breathlessly enthusiastic about this future piece of landfill. And the commenters will have what appear to be fully fleshed out profiles with photos and apparently lives apart from their comments about “bursting into tears when they received it” or “can’t wait till my husband opens his on christmas”.
Hear me out, here: some people really are that excited about useless crap. Further - there is a selection bias at work here, due to the correlation between liking a product and caring enough to post about it on Facebook.
I don’t even know if there is a factual answer. My understanding is that the sponosor has its settings set as “most relevant” or something, and that makes the positive comments appearing at the top and negative at the bottom.
I’ve seen plenty of ads where there are negative comments and where the manufacturer replied and helped out with an unhappy customer.
I’ve left negative comments at times if I felt the product was junk.
Hmm. I hadn’t considered that. But still, the comments seem too fake to possibly be real. On this particular ad, someone 30 weeks ago comments “i’m waiting for payday to get one for my dog who passed away last year” and there is a reply 28 weeks later from another ‘customer’ saying “i’m so sorry for your loss”. Who does that???
Lots of bots. I got an ad a while ago for a handheld battery bank capable of charging an iPhone several times, that had solar cells on one side (6" x 3" or so) wich they claimed could charge the battery in less than a day. Total bullshit. There’s a bunch of these on the market, and real tests show they can take a week to get enough charge to charge a cell phone. But the post was full of ‘testimonials’ about how well it worked and how quickly it charged - peppered with maybe one comment in 20 from a real customer claiming it’s a scam and doesn’t charge anywhere near as fast as claimed.
Facebook users do that. Many of them are computer illiterate and don’t notice things like timestamps and what post a comment was on or that the Mary who commented has a completely different last name and profile picture than their friend Mary.
Well, aside from not paying attention to the posting date, who offers condolences to a perfect stranger about a pet that died a year ago in the comments section for an advertisement?
The sort of people who buy plexiglass pet memorials?
Also, I assume the same sort of people who answer product questions on Amazon like Does this product come with the charging cable? I don’t know because I never opened the one I sent to my daughter. She hasn’t thanked me for it yet but I’m sure she’s enjoying it! I’m so happy she’s having a good time in Tuscon.
Or you underestimate how many people see these ads. Compare it to email spam. Most of us see our spam and think “How could anyone fall for that?”, but apparently some people do. Facebook just lets everyone see it happening in real time. Sort of …
One possibility is that those are accounts of real people, but that bots have their passwords and are able to post comments as that account. The bots might be logging in with the user name + password and posting comments for whatever products are being promoted.
Another possibility is that the owners of these accounts are being mind controlled by space aliens.
How can we decide which of the three options - hacking bots, space aliens, or easily impressed folks - is true? If only we had some kind of razor that could cut through the bad ideas while leaving the good ones!
This may be a separate topic, but it’s still Facebook related…
In the comments after someone posts something on their profile, I’ve begun seeing messages from random people stating something like : “I came across your profile and I can see you are a beautiful and inspiring person inside and out. I would be honored if you would accept me as a Friend”. It’s always worded along those lines like its somehow being sent out en masse like a spam email.
What is the person or bot posting this trying to get? Obviously to be added as a friend, but why?
I’ve seen a few of these, and iirc the messenger usually had the profile pic of an attractive young woman. I’d guess that the message is the opening gambit for a romance scam.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious, but this type of behavior is commonly done for various services. One attack vector is to get a trojan installed on a user’s computer and then do various actions from their computer. This is typically called a zombie computer. The hackers may send emails as the person to everyone in their contact list. If you’ve gotten spam emails from someone you know, this is sometimes the reason. If the person has Facebook browser cookies on their computer, the hacker could use those cookies to post comments as that user. The hacker could also install keyloggers to get the person’s passwords and then log into the services remotely. So the Facebook accounts can be real accounts, but there are multiple ways that hackers can use those accounts for their own purposes.