Inside Social Media's Fake Fan Industry 63
jfruh writes "It's an open secret that many high-profile users of social media networks pay to pad their fan counts. But what you do you get for your money? One blogger decided to shell out some cash to find out. Instead of the real human fans he was promised, he found himself followed by a motley collection of obvious fakes created by non-English speakers and accounts that seem to mainly exist to spam porn links."
So basically the reason social media (Score:3, Interesting)
is even popular is because every one can now become a celebrity in their own little delusional world. Lucky for me I don't get social media, I'd rather stay obscure as BeOS.
Re:The real problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there was a bit more involved there.
In the early MySpace/gaming days, many of the social games gave you big advantages for having more friends than your opponents. Even now, games like Farmville are geared towards having a huge amount of friends to 'gift' you digital trinkets and perform menial digital tasks.
Also, the 'fake friends' and 'fake followers' used to be used for fake click-throughs, to up the amount of money ad advertiser would pay you for hosting an ad banner.
Nowadays, you get what you pay for. TFA's author likely paid on the low-end. If he wanted what folks like Microsoft get (see any CNET article comment section concerning Microsoft if you want examples), you gotta be prepared to open the checkbook [waggeneredstrom.com]...
When you stack the ducats high, you get top-end fake comments/reviews/whatever.