While click farms are not new, they are getting more efficient.

At a “traditional” operation, a click farmer who owns hundreds of mobile phones or computers, each with a unique IP address, would have to physically interact with each device to like posts and follow accounts.

At modern operations – so-called box farms – everything can be hooked up to a single computer, on which farmers can control any device at the click of a mouse.

This is also more space-efficient, as devices can be arranged into tightfitting racks with no need to interact with them physically.

“One of the bigger click farms we visited had different floors filled with thousands of phones,” says Latham. “They can do hundreds of thousands of accounts and likes per day.

“If your perception and understanding of the world comes from the information that you’re digesting,” he adds, “if someone is able to manipulate what your diet of information is, all of a sudden you can become, to use the food analogy, ‘diabetic’.

“The way social media is being used now as a proxy for soft politics is remarkable.”

Latham, a 34-year-old senior lecturer in photography at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, particularly worries about the effect such manipulation could have on younger generations.

“All the students that I teach experience the world and the news through their phones. There’s so much content thrown at you, at such a rapid pace, that people end up trusting the analytics a lot more than they realise.

“They think, ‘This is something a lot of people seem to be interacting with, therefore it must be true.’ Or, ‘This video has 30,000 views, so I’ll watch it, because other people have watched it.’

“You don’t have time to think about what you’re digesting.”

He started working on his Beggar’s Honey book project, which addresses false narratives online, in 2019, conducting research and establishing contacts, including via hacker forums.

He was set to travel to Asia in April 2020, but the pandemic halted his plans, which caused further problems.

“It’s an ever-changing industry,” he says. “You might have several contacts one month, then they’ve all moved to different countries the next or are running away from legislation.”

The legality of click farms is a grey area and changes from country to country, he says, though their activity violates the terms and conditions of social media companies such as Meta.

“Within Vietnam, it’s sort of an open secret,” he says, “[whereas] someone I spoke to in Germany, who was building his own click farm, was utterly terrified of being found out.”

Mainland China has had an Anti-Unfair Competition Law since 1993. A 2017 amendment introduced prohibitions on false user ratings, “honours” or sales amounts to mislead customers, seemingly targeting click farms.

The same year, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba (owner of the South China Morning Post) won a legal case against Hangzhou Jianshi Technology, the company behind click-farm site Shatui, for what was judged as fraudulent practices, including inflating sales numbers and creating bogus reviews.

“[In mainland China] click farms can now be charged under new legislation and from 2018 onwards, more farms are finding themselves facing court cases,” says Latham.

He explains that when his contacts in mainland China went to ground, he started looking for other click farmers and found three in Hong Kong.

The scheduled meeting with M in 2023 never happened. “He got cold feet,” says Latham. “I think he got anxious. It was all planned: we would visit his set-up and take photographs – not of him, just his set-up.

“He decided not to show up [and blocked our phone numbers], which was frustrating.”

Instead, Latham visited the registered Hong Kong addresses of the businesses he suspected to be click farms and photographed their exteriors. For an inside look, however, he had to turn his attention to Vietnam.

“Vietnam has very quickly become the place for click farms. Electricity is also very cheap, which is a key advantage.

“You go into a space and you’re blown away by the technology. They thought it was quite funny that I wanted to take photos of what, in their eyes, is just machinery.

“We visited one click farm that’s on the top floor of a hotel and seemed like a tech start-up. Everyone there was under the age of 24, and they had seven or eight employees.

“We went to another on the outskirts of Hanoi, which was multistoreyed but a family-run business. Others had just a single person.”

By helping expose click farms, Latham hopes to make people more aware of how misleading user ratings, views and like counts can be, so that they will start to question the authenticity of the content they encounter online.

“It’s easier to fight the monster with the lights turned on and knowing what it looks like,” he says. “I’d love for people to be more cautious of how they interact or give credence to something on social media.

“I’m concerned about the amount of information each person learns about the world from their phones these days. It’s terrifying.”