Do Androids Dream On Instagram Followers?
Or how teenagers became replicants in order to increase their stats and trashed my Instagram account in the process
In the last three weeks my Instagram has become almost useless due to the number of wrong mentions and new — unwanted — followers.
The problem seems to be my account name — @ganar — which in Spanish means to win or to get more, and some sort of spam game which I still can’t understand the purpose of.
1) Follow the last person.
2) Make a screenshot of their profile page.
3) You will be posted and become famous!
Spammers have begun naming accounts starting with my username — in the picture @ganar_seguidoores — with some sort of weird pyramid scheme to win Instagram followers. The instructions vary depending on the account: the simpler, the better; but the result is the same: a quick number of followers.
Most of the participants in the scheme are young people repeating the instructions, with the same mistake, over and over again: They will type @ganar seguidoores —with a space between the two words — instead of @ganar_seguidoores and forget the underscore. At the beginning it was funny, but the number of mentions grew to a point where I can no longer distinguish between the mistakes and the people that was really commenting on my pictures. Instagram will not eliminate or block the accounts promoting the scheme.
Replicants are like any other machine…
From all of the mistakes a pattern emerged, repeated time and time again, in a robot-like behavior, by a big number of accounts.
The weird thing is that each bot account has a huge amount of selfies of the same young person. It does make me wonder if, like the replicants on Blade Runner, all of them are fake memories of kids that don’t exist, polaroids found at the scene of the crime.
Do we all become bots when offered cheap thrills? Do we copy-and-paste our way into the compulsive behavior of Social Media in the same manner? If there is a Voight Kampff test that I can apply to these accounts, should I be weary to pass it first?
