let us start with the known bug from facebook’s own dev site:
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=74700
It appears this is a problem with the IDs of objects other than Posts. Posts
have object IDs of the form USERID_POSTID. When used with the /likes/ URL,
Posts can apparently be liked because their URL conforms to this format.
However, other items, such as status messages, photos, videos, etc. all conform
to the simpler ITEMID object ID. If you add the person who posted the item
(from the from field) to make it of the form USERID_ITEMID, you can also like
and unlike these other types of items.
So let us take http://www.facebook.com/CirqueduSoleil as an example, it has a person ID of 144074117500. For some wierd reason, it is a Person. So, how can I like a Person with the Social graph API…. I am definitely running into the “Whitelist Error” when I try to /144074117500/likes
So how can I “like” anything besides something in the format of userid_postid, in other very simple word: how can I simply like a person using the social graph api?
Firstly, you are not talking about “persons” (users) but facebook pages. And secondly, facebook developers can not create a application that allows to like facebook pages. You can like statuses, comments, pictures, videos, shared links via API (doing POST request on //likes), but not facebook pages. Users can like pages only with the facebook social plugins fb:like (or using the facebook website).
So, why whitelists ? I guess because Facebook can allow some privileged partners to add this feature, but that is not widely open.
You can check some other similar answers for this questions.