Fake Followers and Social Media
Recent reporting by the New York Times shows that major social media personalities are purchasing automated Twitter followers wholesale and reaping the financial benefits of the “attention” they represent.
This should not surprise us. Twitter and Facebook are attention economies, places where “human attention has become a scarce, but hotly sought-after commodity in a landscape marked by information glut.” In any economy where something can be manufactured for pennies and sold for dollars, we should expect to find buyers and sellers. Twitter followers and retweets are that kind of commodity.
In a vacuum, we should not be afraid that companies and personalities are competing for our attention. Twitter and Facebook have an incentive to rein in fraudulent accounts in order to maintain the credibility of their attention metrics (followers, retweets, likes, and shares). This credibility influences both the people who consume their content and the people who purchase advertisements for their content. Their businesses depend on it. However, our society does not operate in a vacuum; these platforms impact every aspect of our lives.
We should be very concerned about the influence that these attention economies have on our system of government. Attention economies have a strong influence over how our elected officials campaign for office and act once in office.
Most elected officials craft policies based on how the officials will be perceived, not how effective the policies will be.
If you agree with that statement, then you acknowledge that politicians are thinking about the attention they will receive and not the quality of the decisions they make.
Now consider that statement from the politician’s perspective. To win the next election, you need:
- Name Recognition (breadth): The more people who have heard of you, the more likely you are to win. In order for people to hear your name, you need to “make news”. Something that is newsworthy is something that is worthy of attention. Attention is the currency of Facebook, Twitter, Newspapers, Cable News, and any other ad-supported platform where they sell ads based on the number of “eyeballs” they receive.
- Activated Supporters (depth): The more people who volunteer, donate, and publicly express support for your candidacy, the more likely you are to win. Your activated supporters are motivated to go vote for you, and also motivated enough to convince their community members to do the same.
Currently, politicians look at campaigns like a sales funnel:
For many candidates, especially those who aspire to be state and national candidates, the majority of activities are devoted to increasing the number of impressions at the top of the funnel: that is, garnering more attention.
Now consider the best way for candidates and elected officials to garner attention. As we wrote previously:
Research shows that the biggest determinants of a story’s success on TV and the Internet are its “valence” and “arousal”, or the extent to which the story makes you feel a strong emotion like anger, anxiety, awe, or humor.
Which of the following actions provokes more anger, anxiety, fear, awe, and humor?
- Publicly criticizing another official’s budget proposal as soft, dangerous, and related to his receding hairline.
- Announcing a bi-partisan budget proposal that accounts for differing views on spending priorities.
Which of these actions would be in the best interest of our country? The actions public officials take are related to their incentives in the attention economy.
Back to the New York Times article. How could another country or a single wealthy individual influence our elections?
All they have to do is buy a bunch of fake accounts, craft provocative stories that make people angry, anxious, or fearful, and share the provocative stories using the fake accounts. The attention economy takes care of the rest.
Where do we go from here?
In the public sphere, we have to replace the attention economy with something better. ActWorthy replaces the attention economy with the action economy.
ActWorthy provides a free feed of political actions related to your issues in your community. We make it simple to find the activists, organizations, and candidates who are fighting your fight.
Our algorithms promote the actions that people most want to take.
We give a bigger platform to the activists, organizations, and candidates who want to make your community better, not the people who say the most attention-grabbing thing.
The currency of the action economy cannot be bought by a wealthy person or a foreign power. Two things influence ActWorthy’s rankings:
- How many people take an action. The more people who take action in your community, the more people see them. This can be gamed, but increasing the number of people appearing to take an action will only galvanize the opposition to actually take an opposing action.
- How many local activists, organizations, and candidates endorse the action: You choose who to trust. We let the people you trust recommend the actions that will impact your community.
ActWorthy is not ad-supported. To create actions and events on ActWorthy, you have to pay for an account. This makes it expensive to build a troll army, and forces us to develop a platform that meets the needs of those driving change, not advertisers.
Want to get started? Create an Action on ActWorthy today. It’s free during our Beta launch.
Epilogue: Our Values as a Society
Even if you are not concerned about how Twitter and Facebook affect our politics, consider their impact on our values as a society. A child who grows up in the U.S. sees the most successful people as the people who garner the most attention. The people who get the most attention on these platforms are the people who say and do the most provocative things. This tells our children that being provocative is the path to success. Look no further than the Oval Office to discover the truth of this statement. Think about which people have the most “name recognition” in our society and why.
We should have a platform where the people who have the most followers are the people who do the most good. ActWorthy is that platform.
Join the movement. Head over to actworthy.org and start taking action today.
