those entities offer complete “solutions” and their techniques are rather opaque. By investigating a crowdsourcing platform, this research unveils the underlying mechanics and organization of such campaigns. The research is based on a uniquely large number of observations. Small, cheap campaigns, the manipulation of less significant platforms is also included, while the related work tends to focus on mass, politically motivated efforts. **Keywords**: Crowdsourcing, Social media, Electronic word-of-mouth, facebook, twitter, youtube, reddit
author:
- |
    Mihály Héder\
    MTA SZTAKI\
    mihaly.heder@sztaki.mta.hu\
bibliography:
- 'OpMicro.bib'
title: '**A black market for upvotes and likes**'
---

Introduction
============

This article analyses marketing campaigns that have been executed through the hiring of *freelancers* or “*microworkers*” to complete short, menial tasks called *microtasks* that usually pay less than one US dollar each, and most often only around ten cents. These tasks include watching, liking, upvoting, and “+1”-ing items on web platforms featuring social media functions, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. A job description showing what such a campaign looks is given below (an actual, observed example):

    Title: Facebook Like: <REDACTED String>
    Payment: USD 0.15
    Number of workers accepted: 100

    Job description:

    WARNING: we manually review almost all of the submitted tasks. Thus, if we find 