Follow for a Follow, Like for a Like; Dollar for a Follow, Dollar for a Like.
There was this girl I knew and she treasured her Instagram account so much. Not only was her online life non-representative of her real one, but she had also somehow accumulated an extra 300 followers in one night. And it doesn’t end here, I had noticed that she would upload images late at night; hash tagging almost every named country on earth and every synonym of ‘pretty’. She would then delete her comment after gaining a good amount of attention. Although I’m certain that a good number of her followers are fake and bought, I also believe that her strategy and unethical social activities are actually quite impressive.
This got me curious, what are the extremes people would go to just for likes and followers?
Buying Attention:
In an article called The Inevitable Bite of Buying Followers by Hutchinson reported that “the fake social media profile is worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.” These occurrences are not only dealt by famous stars like P.Diddy (185,000 twitter followers which rapidly grew a 3000% increase) but is also found guilty from politicians like Tony Abbott (who soared from 157,000 to 198,000 followers leading to the election) and even the general public. Due to commonality, it’s no wonder why everyone wants to convert over to the dark side. It’s simple; more followers equals more attention and popularity. And as a result, the attention can also provide more opportunities. Hutchinson stated that “even if you start with 100,000 fake followers, it’s possible that you could gain 100,000 real followers as a result, and that’s 100,000 potential customers to market to.” Not only can you buy fans, followers, likes and shares, but CBC News even found a site willing to provide a fabricated Facebook girlfriend for a price. And if you ever do choose to purchase cheap and easy followers/likes you must understand that there are consequences. Once you’ve processed your purchase, you’d receive click bot likes from a third world country; an influx in attention that is hard to sustain; and strange and unreadable comments from strange and random people. Clearly it’s not so worth it. Knowlton Thomas proved it in The Great Fake Twitter Follower Experiment and Rory Cellan-Jones in the Who ‘likes’ my Virtual Bagels?
Fake Competitions and Hope Filled Scams:
I’m certain we’ve all come across one of these suspicious looking invites before. It appears that those who create them are always creating clever and new ways to deceive you. In most scenarios, scam pages advertise fake competitions which hope to capture our desires by offering expensive and desirable prizes. It’s pretty much a trend now since it’s so common. There are numerous examples of this occurrence, yet the most recent are the BMW give-away on Facebook and the lottery give-away on Instagram. Both of these example pages were created recently. And they had giveaway stories which offered false hope and information: check. After attaining several thousand likes, each page would then disappear with no winners declared but an awesome pay-check. As mentioned in the BMW M5 Giveaway Like-framing scam the aim of these fraudulent pages is to harvest a large number of likes in the shortest time possible. Once these likes have been farmed well, the page is then either sold via the black market to other scammers or to retailers who rebrand the high traffic page. And if you’ve provided them with enough personal details, you may be screwed.
Strategic and misleading posts:
And yet my favourite of them all is the attention seeking and heart wrenching posts. Imagine this, I’m a Facebook post and if you ignore me; unlike me or un-share me, you’d either die, get cursed, get cancer or you’re stone cold cruel. Yes, feel that guilt of turning a blind eye. In the All about facebook ‘like’ scam posts, Pearce makes clear that the anger he feels from these types of posts (which do receive much traffic) are based upon the unashamed use of terrible circumstances like cancer, sick kids or horrific accidents. And the reason behind the desires to get likes, comments and shares are to obviously get money and appeal as all previous strategies do. A great example is the Mallory one. In liking the post and image, you’d be helping the down syndrome child believe she was beautiful. As much as it was a hoax, in 3 days it had received over 70,000 likes then vanished and re-branded.
It just comes to show that in this world of social media, attention is becoming harder to acquire due to the vast numbers of competitors/users thus creative measures are used to keep some users apart from the rest. In the scheme of social media attention-which is now such a popular trend-it appears that money and attention has fuelled this industry influencing some participants to either immorally strategize or buy their ways into the top. Before you consider going to the dark side, remember that the profits are no more than an influx of fake or wrongfully lured followers which provide no real engagement anyways and as the Associated Press mentions, it dilutes the user experience. If you think about it, you’re just taking the social out of your social media; you’ll be nothing but an empty shell.
