Video: Threatin Hired a Click Farm Like This One to Inflate Facebook and YouTube Numbers

The biggest question surrounding the whole Threatin saga I’ve been getting from friends outside of “Well, what did he think would end up happening??” has been about the fake Facebook likes and YouTube views Jered purchased to give the illusion his band was much more popular than they were. Yes, Facebook likes and YouTube views can be purchased through illegitimate means, and they’re not even all that expensive. “Click farms” in places such as Indonesia, China, Malaysia and, in Threatin’s case Brazil, have shady operations set up at which they employ an army of bots, using fake accounts created just for this purpose, to like/view/subscribe/RSVP to your thing, whatever that thing may be.

Thanks to a Russian media outlet visiting a click farm in China [via Metal Injection], we’ve now got an inside look into one of these click farms. In the nearly minute-long video, you can see hundreds of phones mounted on a rack each performing various automated tasks, from streaming Spotify songs to liking Facebook pages to following Twitter accounts. This video is positively mesmerizing! I’m transfixed.

The fake likes/streams/etc. are not substantive, of course; they just serve to inflate the total number, and the fake accounts used to goose those numbers will have no interaction with the entity you’ve purchased attention for afterwards. Still, a lot of folks in the music industry use a quick glance at these numbers as a relative gauge of popularity, and as we’ve learned over the past week sometimes it works.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to hiring one of these click farms to like all the Corey Taylor and Metallica articles we post on MetalSucks.