So a few days ago I had a sudden influx of likes on a facebook page that I was an admin for. I don’t pay for any likes and I was not expecting to get an extra 1500 likes overnight! I checked them out and they all appeared to be from Turkey. So I did a bit of investigating and it seems that this is common practice among people who are paid to like pages, that they also like pages they are not paid to like to disguise this illicit activity.

Having these likes was not going to help my facebook page at all. In fact I was annoyed because I was going to pay for some post boosting in the next few weeks and I didn’t want to pay to boost posts to people who were not interested.

I tried in vain on my phone and my iPad to find some way of reporting these suspicious likes to facebook but I failed. I figured that I would have to find a way through my laptop. There didn’t really seem to be any specific way to contact them about this so I used a general issues form. Somehow I doubt that this will get me anywhere and I have read about people managing to find somewhere to complain but not getting any response.

So it falls down to me to somehow get rid of all these fake Likers. Again there appears to be no way to do this on phone or iPad – it seems like there is different functionality on each device but nothing to remove likes from a page. On the Facebook FAQ it tells you to use the Pages app to block people (but it doesn’t actually tell you how!!) but I couldn’t find any way of doing it on that.

So in the end I had to go to the desktop version of facebook and start deleting them all one by one. It’s going to be a long process but I will just have to keep chipping away at them until they are all gone. You can get to the remove option by going to Settings, then Blocked users and at the top select ‘people who like this’ – this will show the most recent likes and using the drop down arrow on the right you can select ‘remove’ (see below)

You can also use the settings to stop your page appearing in countries where most of the spammers reside. These include Russia, Pakistan and Turkey but also there could be many others. If your page is not going to interest people in those countries it might be worth blocking them before this happens.