I think I heard you can get 10,000 Facebook followers for about $100 just a few days ago. These sort of tactics are nothing new. But they are usually pretty worthless. You need to have some kind of relationship with your followers - not to be a spammer to a large list of them.
View inflation can create the illusion of popularity which can be incredibly vital for lots of purposes, e.g. convincing investors, building hype, etc.
A lot of book publishers now use facebook likes as a way of determining whether to buy manuscripts from specific authors--which is ridiculous because of things like fivver. I've studied this stuff for a while--I'm a bit dubious in that regard-- to see how such things can be exploited for benefit and it's a tremendous span--so many industries are trying to be web savvy and latching onto things like likes and views, and favourites--but all of these are as demonstrated in this post are fairly easily exploitable.
