USA Today could be a credible source for bots to follow for free to increase their own legitimacy.

How does it increase the legitimacy? Page likes aren't public (when viewing from/as the page).

So this is about Twitter and not FB, but I went on a weird trip down the rabbit hole when looking into how certain accounts were becoming popular/growing so quickly.

There are a whole bunch of "networks" of fake accounts, often complete with very legitimate looking photos, names, and even posts. The main difference, however, is they follow and retweet a lot.

If you look at what they follow and retweet, however, well over half seems to be "legit" stuff that wouldn't be getting involved in such schemes. I think the reason is that if Twitter decides to crack down on bot networks, they might look at what the bots are following and promoting to work out who to penalize.. except they aren't going to start deleting CNN, Fox News or random celebrities.. so they really have no great way to tell who to punish. I suspect FB bots work in a similar way.

Not the legitimacy of the page being liked, of the bot's profile. Filling it with dummy information, including various liked pages, posts, etc, to use them for astroturfing.

People follow pages and join groups and all that, so bots have to do that as well to blend in. It's to make the bot more legitimate.

I'm not sure they're bots, rather people cheaply paid to create fake accounts, or scammers. I've seen many of them, and some of them are quite amateurish. They would say they went to Florida University and come from Florida City, working in... oil.

Maybe they paid some blackhat "marketing firm" not fully realizing it?

What makes you think they didn't realize it?

"The USA Today spokeswoman told CJR that they flagged the issue for Facebook after noticing an unusually large uptick in followers from the aforementioned countries. “Since we first brought this issue to Facebook’s attention, we have been in close communication with them and look forward to a swift solution that prevents this illegitimate activity from happening on our Facebook page in the future,” Maribel Wadsworth, Gannett’s chief transformation officer, told USA Today Friday."

The article suggests USA Today brought this to Facebook's attention. If USA Today had been doing this on purpose, even indirectly, that would be a bizarre move. We also have nothing from Facebook contradicting this claim.

You can hypothesize nobody asked Facebook about it or that USA Today is now lying to try to save face, but those would be hypotheses that are possible, but not currently supported by the facts. It is a reasonable interpretation that USA Today is indeed a target of some sort and not the instigator. I am also not sure exactly what the bots sought to gain from this, but I've seen enough similarly crazy things that made sense once an explanation came out that I'm willing to give some time for such an explanation to come out.

I've got no love lost for the media but they're still shining beacons of virtue compared to the people authoring and running bot networks for this sort of thing, so I don't find it that hard to trust USA Today enough to consider their version to be the most likely story. (Not the only story, but pending further data, the most likely one.)

Call me cynical, but I'm betting USA Today paid for millions of fake followers to pump up their stats (making them a more attractive platform for native advertising), got wind that Facebook was onto them and decided to break the story first and act like they were the ones to tell Facebook about it in the first place to save face. Nowhere else besides this woman's quote does it say that Facebook initiated their bot-destroying campaign after USA Today told them about all of their fake followers. They're lying, plain and simple.

And this is based on... what, exactly?

1. They didn't break the story, CJR did.

2. Why would they buy so many likes? In my experience, native ad sales revolve around native metrics. Buying bots to like your page (but not visit or interact with your website) won't help you there.

It's based on being cynical due to working in marketing for 15 years. Obviously I'm only speculating. I mentioned native ad sales because sites that engage in native marketing typically sell a package that includes posting the native content to their Facebook page, which has X number of followers. The higher that number, obviously the more attractive it is.

Yeah, I don't get people's weird obsession with trying to explain away blackhat marketing when it's perfectly normal and acceptable to put your own interests ahead of Facebook (assuming you aren't breaking a real law).

Because they may have hired an Agency that hired an expert Agency that hired a Freelancer who hired an remote personal assistant to do the job.

Here's a crazy though. A competitor hires someone to create a botnet to destroy them. You have the fake accounts start liking shitty content and ignoring good content. If the targeted company followed the desires of these fakes they would eventually go out of business.