Academic Study Documents a 'Black Market' for Upvotes, Likes, and Fake Engagement
2018
A 2018 academic study analyzed 7,426 paid campaigns and over 1.8 million microtasks on a crowdsourcing marketplace, cataloguing an industrialized trade in bought upvotes, fake comments, and vote manipulation across social platforms including Reddit-style voting.
What happened
In March 2018, researcher Mihály Héder published 'A black market for upvotes and likes,' an academic study examining the commercial trade in fabricated online engagement. Over a 365-day period the study observed 7,426 paid 'campaigns' on the crowdsourcing platform microworkers.com, comprising roughly 1.86 million individual microtasks, of which about 89.7% were connected to online promotion.
The catalogued tasks included buying upvotes and likes, generating comments at massive scale, online vote manipulation, mass account creation, and techniques explicitly designed to evade detection. The author emphasized that the observed activity represented only a fraction of the overall black market, since many campaigns are invite-only or run on unobservable platforms. The work provided concrete, quantified evidence that the inflation of social-media engagement — including the kind of upvote-based ranking central to Reddit — is a cheap, scalable, professionalized service rather than an occasional abuse.
The study became a frequently cited reference for understanding how vote-manipulation-for-hire operations function and how little budget is required to distort online discourse and rankings, reinforcing why Reddit and similar platforms run continuous anti-manipulation enforcement.
Impact
Provided peer-reviewed, quantified evidence of an industrialized market for fake engagement (upvotes, likes, comments, accounts), grounding concerns about paid vote manipulation on Reddit-style platforms in measured data rather than anecdote.