Click farm platforms

Abstract

The article analyses work on click farm platforms in Brazil and Colombia. It argues that work on these platforms updates and renews the historical informality of work in Latin America. Drawing on click farm ethnography, worker interviews and digital ethnography on WhatsApp and Facebook groups and Youtube channels, the research highlights: first, the cultural marks of Brazil and Colombia in the interactions between workers, typical of Latin American digital culture; second, the role of Youtubers as skill makers, responsible for the initiation of workers into click farm platforms and the circulation of neoliberal and entrepreneurial ideology; third, practices and discourses relating to reselling accounts, photos and bots as a new version of the historical resale markets in the region; and fourth, the boundaries between informality and illegality at work on click farm platforms. The article argues that, in addition to informal work that preceded and is connected to work on click farms, informality gains new dimensions with work on click farms, with the platformisation of labour representing an articulation between the old informality and new market practices and infrastructures.

Social media and platform work: Stories, practices, and workers’ organisation

“…The ‘mad rush’ for these metrics has led the social media industry to relate to forms of scams and frauds (Grohmann et al, 2022a), especially through click farms (Grohmann et al, 2022b) and follower factories (Lindquist, 2021), mainly present in countries of the Global South, such as Brazil, Philippines, and Indonesia. Click farms are web-based platforms – in general, local companies – where workers, as ‘human bots’, are paid to click, follow, and comment on social media accounts, especially creators (Grohmann, 2022).…”

“…In addition, there are parallel markets for fake accounts, with buying and selling accounts – and websites where the creator can buy ‘local’ or ‘international’ followers for various platforms, such as TikTok, Kwai, and Instagram. This ‘platform scam’ context (Grohmann et al, 2022a) brings social media labour closer to the disinformation industry (Ong and Cabanes, 2019).…”

Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems

“…To move beyond an a priori villainization of disinformation-for-hire actors and gain access to a highly obfuscated market (Bay & Reynolds, 2018), scholars have increasingly utilized ethnographic methods, most often focusing on digital labor in the Global South, to develop a more in-depth behind-the-scenes understanding of the industry for the production of disinformation (e.g., Grohmann, Aquino, et al, 2022; Grohmann, Pereira, et al, 2022; Lindquist, 2021, 2022; Ong & Cabañes, 2018; Ong & Tapsell, 2022). In line with this, ethnographic research and interviews with disinformation-for-hire actors in Indonesia and Turkey, two major countries in the engagement market, form the key entry point for this case study.…”

“…Interlocutors generally worked in small groups of young men (from a few up to 10), most in their 20s, often friends, relatives, or neighbors who identified as self-taught and had learned to make money through the internet. Although some had offices, most worked discretely out of their homes in cottage industries (Lindquist, 2022; see also Grohmann, Aquino, et al, 2022). Interlocutors revealed that engagements were primarily purchased from sellers located outside of the country and resold to domestic buyers.…”

Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…This centrally involves the extraction of resources, bodies, and territories through data extractivism, as the rich literature on the topic has addressed (Crawford, 2021;Grohmann & Araújo, 2021;Ricaurte, 2022). This is also a call to address disinformation-for-hire in this subfield, especially how the everyday labor of data workers is entangled with global value chains of disinformation, not only in political campaigns, but also in entertainment sectors (Grohmann, Aquino, et al, 2022).…”