You seem knowledgeable. What is the main purpose of bots on facebook?
The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.
[1] You can win a bunch of contests, competitions like those who have lot of likes can win iphone or other tech.
[2] You can sell likes.. just google and you will see, there are alot of places where you can buy it.
[3] Manipulation of public opinion.
Edit:
From FB side:
[1] they still have growth of users
[2] more bots == more clicks, more likes more FB value "on paper", more revenue
[3] and when they stabilize their market value they can easily kill those bots, just require them activation by phone.
vk.com Russian social network, had same issues, but they enabled phone activation for averybody and its not that easy to buy a lot of phone numbers in Russia, but some hackers just pay to vk.com admins...
The article implies they could be used by facebook or competitors to burn up ad revenue, but this approach would just kill the golden pay-per-click goose.