Bangalore: Companies, celebrities and even the U.S. State Department have allegedly bought Facebook likes, Twitter followers and YouTube viewers from offshore “click farms,” where the workers just click on the “like” button, view videos or tweet comments to increase the count and popularity on social media networks.

Ever since the inception of Facebook, members used “clicks” to increase their popularity among friends and now companies are following the trend and buying “likes.” Facebook is not the lone culprit; Linkedin and Twitter also have their part, where members with more connections are reported to have better employability prospects. According to Mitul Gandhi, CEO of SeoClarity, a social media marketing firm that weeds out phony online engagements, “Any time there's a monetary value added to clicks, there's going to be people going to the dark side.”

There was a time when software developers wrote codes for generating fake clicks, and the tech companies revolted by creating software that was able to detect and block “robotic clicks.” Tech giants like YouTube and Google are constantly fighting against fake “likes” and “clicks” on the videos and advertisements on their websites. Facebook reported that 14.1 million of its 1.18 billion users are fake and this is a startling revelation as it contradicts the principle of Facebook—all users being “real” and not robots.