The New Aesthetic

A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites—where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images—has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam.

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“The worst thing is that this is so difficult to detect,” says Zhao. “All our security methods assume that there is a program at play, and that imposes constraints that you can detect.” Zhao’s group has previously worked to uncover spam inside Facebook, mostly a result of software bots gaining control of genuine user accounts. Facebook and other Web companies today rely on tools like Captchas or relatively simple rules able to easily spot automated accounts. “If you have a real human involved who is determined, then what you can do is really only limited by the price they are paid,” says Zhao.