Computer Science Professor Zubair Shafiq researches Facebook “like farms”

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Zubair ShafiqResearch by Computer Science Assistant Professor Zubair Shafiq on Facebook “like farms” has been featured in MIT Technology Review, Yahoo Finance, ACM TechNews, The Telegraph, Pacific Standard, Zero Hedge, and MediaPost. The research explores practices of a secret Facebook industry that generates page “likes” for pay.

Shafiq is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His broad research interests are networking and security, including a focus on online social networks.

Along with researchers at University College London and National ICT Australia, Shafiq set up 13 Facebook pages about “Virtual Electricity”. The pages were blank from content except for the sentence, “This is not a real page, so please do not like it.” On some of these pages, the researchers relied on traffic generated from Facebook ads; on the remaining pages, they hired “like farms” to generate visits. Through comparing their findings, the team concluded at least one “like farm” uses automated bots operating fake profiles.

The paper, “Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots”, is available in its entirety on arXiv.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.