Facebook’s Like button can still easily be gamed

Facebook’s Like button is a pervasive feature of the Web, a way to gauge the popularity of a website or piece of content. But researchers have found it’s easy to inflate the numbers, undermining its value as an accurate measure of popularity.

The problem of bogus Likes has been around for some time, and Facebook has released updates to its software over the last couple of years to cut down on fraudulent ones generated by spammers.

But researchers with McGill University’s School of Computer Science in Montreal say the social networking company still hasn’t fixed several major problems with the feature. This week, they released a research paper outlining the problems, which they first told Facebook about in early 2013.

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Network World Security