Inside the weird, shady world of click farms

Ear­ly in 2023, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jack Lath­am was in Hong Kong, when he received instruc­tions to vis­it a non­de­script hotel among the city’s dense­ly packed sky­scrap­ers. Over the past four years, he had been search­ing for access to a click farm – shad­owy oper­a­tions that use large num­bers of elec­tron­ic devices to boost engage­ment online and manip­u­late algo­rithms – and after con­nect­ing with some peo­ple on hack­er forums, he was now vis­it­ing one for the first time. Tak­ing the ele­va­tor to the top floor, he was shown into a small room where hun­dreds of smart­phones lined the walls, all con­nect­ed to com­put­ers via a dense web of cables.

Eight peo­ple worked on the phones, send­ing thou­sands of likes and fol­lows to con­tent that they had been paid to pro­mote. ​“It was quite strange, it almost felt like an office – I felt like I was at a young tech start­up, I don’t think any­body there was old­er than 25, and they broke down the soft­ware and how it all works and what you can do,” Lath­am recalls. ​“These phones are con­nect­ed to a main com­put­er and when a client pops up, whether it’s Insta­gram, Face­book or Tik­Tok, they then enter someone’s pro­file, which appears on every sin­gle phone simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and you press fol­low or like.”

The fast engage­ment arti­fi­cial­ly inflates the pop­u­lar­i­ty of their posts, as well as trick­ing algo­rithms into boost­ing con­tent more, giv­ing clients the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go viral quick­ly. ​“Each phone is a dif­fer­ent account, and each can change its IP address 20 times [a day],” he con­tin­ues. ​“Each phone is tech­ni­cal­ly 20 dif­fer­ent phones, so you can see how it scales up.”

After that first vis­it, Lath­am sought out oth­er click farms across Viet­nam and Hong Kong, pho­tograph­ing what he found inside and even pur­chas­ing his own farm, which he keeps stowed in the liv­ing room of his Lon­don apart­ment. Those shots he took dur­ing his trav­els, show­ing the end­less tele­phones laid out neat­ly in rows, are pre­sent­ed in his new pho­to­book Beggar’s Hon­ey, along­side obscured, sur­re­al pic­tures he manip­u­lat­ed from peo­ple who reached out to him ask­ing for boosts to their content.

“The way [the book works] is that you flick through fold­outs that look like phones, and you have noth­ing but con­tent that peo­ple have asked me to like on social media as a click farmer,” he explains, before detail­ing exam­ples of the media he was asked to boost. ​“There was some­thing about immi­grants, oth­er things like how to spot a fake Rolex, there’s lots of nudi­ty, mil­i­tary pro­pa­gan­da and videos of armies, con­spir­a­cy videos about the Twin Tow­ers and a con­spir­a­cy video about the vaccine.”

With­in a land­scape of mis­in­for­ma­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion, it’s easy to see how click farms could be used dan­ger­ous­ly. ​“It’s also been used for nefar­i­ous rea­sons, [a mem­ber of] the BJP Par­ty in India was found to have been buy­ing fake com­ments on social media,” he alleges. ​“I don’t think a lot of peo­ple share things on a big scale inten­tion­al­ly to fool peo­ple, but peo­ple just get fooled by it, and I think con­tent is thrown at you so quick­ly these days that it’s almost impos­si­ble to take notes of what you’re seeing.”

Lath­am even manip­u­lat­ed the announce­ment of his book, which proved to be an effec­tive way to engage his fol­low­ers. ​“When we ini­tial­ly launched the book, the only time I used it is to pro­mote my ini­tial [Insta­gram] post,” he says. ​“So, with­in 30 min­utes, I had 8,000 likes on the post – I could see in real time that this thing was grow­ing and grow­ing. When I did a lec­ture one of the peo­ple in the audi­ence said, ​‘I saw you post it and I bought the book straight away because I thought this book looks incred­i­bly pop­u­lar, so I should prob­a­bly buy it.’”

The pic­tures form a sur­re­al, dis­com­fort­ing look behind the cur­tain of the end­less stream of con­tent that now dom­i­nates our con­sump­tion of media. Latham’s work helps unrav­el and inter­ro­gate the authen­tic­i­ty of what we view through our screens, while also rais­ing ques­tions about what suc­cess means in today’s hyper-online, per­son­al brand­ing dri­ven world. ​“I can cer­tain­ly under­stand the pro­cliv­i­ty for one thing to look pop­u­lar – say you’re a local book­shop or bike repair shop and you make an Insta­gram account and it has zero fol­low­ers and all of a sud­den it doesn’t have the same kind of author­i­ty as some­thing that maybe has 5,000,” he says. ​“So I think [using click farms] is incred­i­bly common.

“There’s this need to appear more pop­u­lar than you are as a form of val­i­da­tion and there’s cer­tain­ly peo­ple in my indus­try I know who have pur­chased fol­low­ers,” he con­tin­ues. ​“I think we’re allow­ing the met­rics of social media to infil­trate our self worth in a way that I think is quite fascinating.”

Beggar’s Hon­ey by Jack Lath­am is pub­lished by Here Press.

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