Facebook undermined by fictitious "Likes" Facebook users are complaining that products and causes are appearing in the "Likes" category of their accounts even though they have no memory of ever clicking on the Like button for those companies and campaigns. The recent wave of "false Likes" caused particular concern around the US presidential election, even online fights among friends, when the profiles of ardent Obama supporters showed Likes for Mitt Romney. One user complained they go into a row on Facebook with someone whose views they had always agreed with because of some of her Likes. "It turned out she hadn't posted them," the user said. The scale of the issue is unclear and the exact cause is difficult to pinpoint, though experts say the likely explanations are tied to Facebook's recent advertising push, especially in mobile. Facebook had had no evidence of any malicious viruses or hacker attacks that propagate false Likes, the company said. It had some reports of false Likes that it determined to be accidental, when people were swiping through the newsfeed on their mobile phones and unintentionally clicked on the Like button of an ad. Shuman Ghosemajumder, vice-president of strategy at Shape Security and former head of product management for click fraud at Google, said another likely cause is that users are getting duped into Liking things, either by misleading language or a confusing user interface. "It can fool the user into clicking on things when they thought they were just browsing for something," he said. There have been instances of brands being pretty aggressive about wanting to increase the number of Likes on their pages. Whatever the reason, artificial Likes can have wide-ranging consequences for users once their names and identities become affiliated with certain corporations or political groups, and these are tensions Facebook will have to manage as it balances the need to boost advertising sales. "When you say you Like something, it frequently gets scraped and stored by other websites and you can never fully delete it from the internet," Mr Ghosemajumder said. What particularly annoys users is when these Likes are used in ads placed in their friends" newsfeeds with their names attached as endorsements. One user did not know she had Liked Duracell Batteries until an ad showed up in two of her friends" newsfeeds saying she Liked Duracell Batteries. Jack Taylor, a web designer, discovered a Like on his account for a Salzburg, Austria travel site. He said he had never visited Salzburg, was not interested in visiting, and never clicked on the Like button. "That really got my hackles up," he said. He started noticing unlikely brand endorsements from friends for Walmart, Shell, and Gap. One friend told him he remembered Liking Gap a year or two ago, but never meant for his name to be used to endorse a 30 per cent off sale there this month. "I find that to be a very loose way of playing with your customers," Mr Taylor said.