where do services get social signals?

Hi, I was wondering if anybody knew how social signals and youtube views/likes are delivered when you order them from a service. I'm new to it and I'm not sure how they typically deliver views/+1s/FB Likes & Shares/YT likes, and what to ask to know it's being done in a natural-looking way. Do they buy up social accounts and use proxies to post to separate accounts manually? Do they send views from Facebook to YT videos? Any info would be really helpful.

I think this could be helpful information for any newbies who are looking to promote their sites/videos using services, to make sure any gain in rankings stay long term (ie. they look natural in google's eyes).

Thanks!

All the above. Some use bots and rely on them being hosted by all members then using the members own unique IP to crawl sites adding visitors/views (Panda traffic, Vagex SocialAdr do this). Others rely on bots and proxies, other hope that everyone will network. Read the small print on whatever service you are considering, there are several ways they work - but they normally tell you up front quite clearly.

Cool, thanks Scritty. Can you say which is probably the most natural/effective, with the least chance of dropping votes or looking like spam, in your opinion? Or any to stay away from?

I think a lot of the people are software developers that build off of open source software. For example, my company has modified a bunch of open source python scripts to automate and scrape all sorts of things. It's not as hard as you'd think even if you are starting out. You can build off of other peoples' work.