I watched this HBO Max documentary called "Fake Famous." In this doc, a tech journalist wanted to see if he could take any 3 people and turn them into top Instagram influencers. Since the documentary just came out, I do not want to spoil it for those who have not yet watched it. However, I want to discuss fake followers/engagement, which played a huge role in this experiment.
Once the 3 "influencers" were chosen, the director Nick Bilton started buying his guinea pigs followers
from this site called "Famoid." He paid around $120 for 7500 followers. He was not going to start them off with a million followers. He wanted it to look like organic growth and did not want Instagram to detect anything funny going on, which I will discuss later.
Once you get followers, you need to pay for engagement. This is where it gets expensive. You ever see people with lots of followers but very low engagement? They probably ran out of money, LOL. So, this director was constantly buying "Likes" and "Comments" so that his "influencers" pages did not look dead or suspicious.
What was said about this whole fake followers, etc., is that Instagram and other platforms do not want to shut bots down because it makes their platforms look good too. They also said that top celebs use bots. They blurred out the faces when they showed the celebrities, but I could have sworn I saw The Weeknd🤭. I was looking for Ole Girl, LOL.
This is done on Youtube and Twitter too.
I would love for y'all to watch it so we can really get into discussions about this idea of faking it until you make it on social media. After watching the doc, I did not feel as anti-bots as I was before watching the doc. It's weird.
Overall I give the documentary a C. When they were not talking about the bots and how they get free shit, I was not engaged.
Say Sumthin, Like, Share...Thanks!
@Kimro
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe ...LOL
@yaya can you give me a name so I can go investigate lol.
@Kimro,
This is what I wanted to discuss. Bump these influencers who are really just hustling for free shit. I wanted to get into these bloggers whose pages seem popping to the casual observer, but to those paying attention shit does seem off. We already know that you can pay to be verified on IG...allegedly.
Do you guys remember the guy Jerome, that said Nicki sent the barbs to attack him? Dont ask me how but I ran across his page after reading this post. What I found was interesting.
As you can see he has almost 80k followers on ig and 152k on Twitter. He is following 124k people on Twitter, which is outrageous 😳. The interesting part is his engagement. On his ig post he had 99 comments, which half was him replying to comments. In reality he only had about 50. I clicked on a few of the profiles in the comments, those people didn't have any post or were private without post.