Very unlikely to have been bots from FB, they're not yet quite that desperate. They would be 90% sure of getting busted, and it would be a huge deal breaker for a lot of their clients. A suicide move.
The more plausible reality is that there are just a lot of bots crawling FB fan pages, poorly programmed bots that will just follow every single link they come across. That's very much in line with my personal experience of FB fan pages.
But FB is certainly to blame for not detecting these as bots, and putting ads on the pages they serve them. Hopefully they'll take care of this issue soon.
The distinction between ignorance and intent does not compute.
Yes, we dont need a conspiracy to explain stupidity. The stupidity is the conspiracy.
People arent ignorant, because they are handcapped or something. They are ignorant, because thats the behaviour and excuse we reward. Just be an idiot, dont put in the intellectual effort, and you will be allowed to speak lies and screw every one and every thing.
From a corporate point of view, its the golden ticket. Plausible deniability. We didnt know that our insurance helped finance weapon exports to dictators. We didnt know. We didnt know. Sorry this, sorry that. We're keeping the money though.
I dont think that provable intent should have legal meaning. Because all neglect is intentional, as is ignorance in a world, where every one has the choice to be well informed.
If I am writing a mechanism to charge for ads based on traffic, one of the first things to QA/write test cases for is fraudulent traffic.
The leap here is from facebook being remotely competent (which is likely), and willfully ignoring checks on certain types of traffic because it benefits them financially.
My assertion is that this is the same class of bad behavior as running your own bots. Note the distinction in 'willful' ignorance.
The more plausible reality is that there are just a lot of bots crawling FB fan pages, poorly programmed bots that will just follow every single link they come across. That's very much in line with my personal experience of FB fan pages.
But FB is certainly to blame for not detecting these as bots, and putting ads on the pages they serve them. Hopefully they'll take care of this issue soon.