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Software Engineering Daily · Nov 17, 2016 · 55 min

Botnet Facebook Likes with Derek Muller

Botnets have a massive influence on the Internet. As we have seen recently with the Mirai Botnet, IOT bots can take down companies as big as Netflix. In our recent episodes about advertising fraud, we’ve talked about how bots are being used to take billions of dollars of revenue from advertisers. Derek Muller is one of those advertisers who has spent money on ads and gotten nothing but fake traffic in return. Two years ago, he posted a video on YouTube about his experience purchasing advertising traffic on Facebook, and getting Likes from accounts that were clearly from fake accounts. Derek is the host of Veritasium, an awesome YouTube channel about science, truth, and technology–so we also talked some about how he built a successful YouTube business.

0:00-55:55

transcript

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show notes

Botnets have a massive influence on the Internet. As we have seen recently with the Mirai Botnet, IOT bots can take down companies as big as Netflix. In our recent episodes about advertising fraud, we’ve talked about how bots are being used to take billions of dollars of revenue from advertisers.

Derek Muller is one of those advertisers who has spent money on ads and gotten nothing but fake traffic in return. Two years ago, he posted a video on YouTube about his experience purchasing advertising traffic on Facebook, and getting Likes from accounts that were clearly from fake accounts.

Derek is the host of Veritasium, an awesome YouTube channel about science, truth, and technology–so we also talked some about how he built a successful YouTube business.