Beggar's Honey

‘Beggar’s Honey’ is an exploration into the clandestine world of click farms.

Click farms are shadowy operations that are responsible for artificially inflating the engagement metrics of content on social media, manipulating the algorithms with serious consequences – from influencing consumer behaviour to compromising the integrity of democratic processes.

Jack Latham’s project seeks to expose the inner workings of click farms for the first time. By juxtaposing the captivating with the covert – images gleaned from TikTok alongside photographs of click farms in Vietnam and Hong Kong – he challenges our perception of the digital landscape and urges us to question the authenticity of the content we encounter daily.

‘Beggar’s Honey’ was awarded the Images Vevey Heidi.news Reportage honourable mention of the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2019/2020 by the jury chaired by Dayanita Singh. The project has been produced and funded by Images Vevey, with the generous support of the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and Heidi.news.

‘Beggar’s Honey’ is the final part of Jack Latham's trilogy about false narratives: how we can be convinced to believe a false narrative (‘Sugar Paper Theories’), how we are inclined to create a false narrative if there is a void of information (‘Parliament of Owls’), and how we are all subject to the propagation of false narratives in today's media economy (‘Beggar’s Honey’).