Inside China's 'planting view, planting' farms

In China, there are many "view farms", where thousands of phones both iPhone and Android are available to create millions of views or virtual reviews for Chinese applications.

According to a CCTV report published in 1028, up to 90% of online video views in China are fake.

These facilities not only "view view" for video, but also provide rating service on the app store.

Most tasks such as appreciation for applications on the repository, downloading and even writing positive reviews are done by software. As a result, the application rose to a high position on the rankings, attracted more users to download, thereby earning more money from advertising.

To build a "view farm" like this, the owner of the farm must invest a lot of effort and money to buy hundreds of old phones, build a server system, buy software.

In addition, they have to buy Apple accounts that have a lot of interaction on the app because they have a higher reputation, more valuable reviews on Apple Store. They do not use virtual accounts because they can be detected by Apple, deleted reviews, even locked applications.

In response to Apple's algorithm, these facilities must always change software. Because of the plowing camps like this, in 2016, Apple had to change the way the application ranking was calculated.

There are also camps that use people to download applications, write reviews to avoid being locked out. On applications such as WeChat or QQ, there are many chat groups to find people who download applications, write reviews.

Thai police have caught a farm plowing reviews by Chinese people operating in 2017. This camp has nearly 500 iPhones, nearly 350,000 SIM cards and dozens of computers operating continuously to increase interaction for sales articles on WeChat. The farm owner said they built the farm here because the mobile data costs in Thailand are quite cheap.

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