Most of social media has been fake for a very long time. I’ve worked with some of these companies and they all know it too but like to have their inflated numbers so they do their best to only target things causing them problems or that are very very obviously not real, both in terms of bots and paid content.
It’s almost always been this way from the moment Facebook had ads and any social media site had an audience. You could spend $1mil on TV and movie ads to promote something, or you could pay $20-50k a person a year to create fabricated organic content in all the right places and get everybody to talk about things and like it. It’s been an obvious play from the beginning. And it does work very well. I’ve worked on things like that for things unrelated to politics and the returns were great. Back then you could even get by with a team of two people making multiple accounts and make it seem like you had thousands of people talking about and posting something. The sites love it too because they also can now inflate their numbers. You can do other minor things that add up on top of that too, like tweak the settings to show active users as counted over a longer period, like say anyone that logged on that day vs that hour, to dramatically increase perceived engagement.
It’s all very easy to game and when people realized that they let it happen because it was mutually beneficial.
Most of social media has been fake for a very long time. I’ve worked with some of these companies and they all know it too but like to have their inflated numbers so they do their best to only target things causing them problems or that are very very obviously not real, both in terms of bots and paid content.
It’s almost always been this way from the moment Facebook had ads and any social media site had an audience. You could spend $1mil on TV and movie ads to promote something, or you could pay $20-50k a person a year to create fabricated organic content in all the right places and get everybody to talk about things and like it. It’s been an obvious play from the beginning. And it does work very well. I’ve worked on things like that for things unrelated to politics and the returns were great. Back then you could even get by with a team of two people making multiple accounts and make it seem like you had thousands of people talking about and posting something. The sites love it too because they also can now inflate their numbers. You can do other minor things that add up on top of that too, like tweak the settings to show active users as counted over a longer period, like say anyone that logged on that day vs that hour, to dramatically increase perceived engagement.
It’s all very easy to game and when people realized that they let it happen because it was mutually beneficial.