Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff
Facebook doesn’t just rely on its users to hit the “Like” button around the Web to tell the world that they endorse a product, news article, hotel, or LOLcat. It scans their private messages to friends, and when it sees a link to a ‘Likeable’ page, it doles out ‘Likes’ accordingly. Two ‘Likes’ per private message sent, to be exact. This is a fascinating find by security researcher Ashkan Soltani, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
A recent online video shows that the social networking site scans the links you’re sending – registering them as though you “Like” the page you sent. … The video, which was posted this week on Hacker News, showed a person who sent links in Facebook messages in order to inflate the number of “Likes” a page had received. Each time the link was sent, the page’s “Like” count went up by two, something that the Hacker News poster said allows people to “pump up to 1,800 ‘Likes’ in an hour.”
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