KUALA LUMPUR: A certain political party has been found manipulating the numbers of Facebook Live viewership in order to create a perception on its purported high rate of popularity and dominance in the social media.
Universiti Teknologi Mara’s media psychological war expert Dr Noor Nirwandy Mat Noordin said the move was also made to create a winning psyche among party member and supporters.
He said the technique used to manipulate FB Live viewership was detected during a recent election campaign speech in Jerlun, Kedah, in which the link to the event was believed to have been shared to three different FB pages.
He said the party might not even realise that the numbers fluctuated at the same time, hence revealing the manipulation of viewership.
“It is impossible for the three different pages to have the same numbers of viewers at the same time.
“The three channels (pages) has similar numbers in viewership. If we look carefully into the speech in Jerlun, there are 14,000 users watching the event.
“Which means, there are 14,000 viewers for each of the FB page at the same time. Logically, when we watch an FB Live event, do we watch it on three channels at the same time?” Nirwandy said in a statement.
Nirwandy said the technique was also used to create a winning mentality among supporters and influence perception of voters.
“This technique needs to be looked into because it can paint a false picture on the rate of support for a certain party.”
On a related note, Nirwandy said there was also a ‘black market’ on the internet offering services to increase the numbers of viewers or viewership on FB Live.
He said the services were available in packages and is sold for US$14 (RM55.17) for 100 viewers and US$149.98 (RM591) for 1,000 viewers.
“You will only need to upload your link, pay and automatically you will have viewers for your pages.”