Why Pay for Fake Twitter Followers?
SOURCE: http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2730/paypal-social-media-don-bought-followers-too/
The article above describes how the director of social media for the internet’s financial service giant, Paypal, is suspected to have paid for most of his 225,000 Twitter followers. With that many followers, he became a suspect when the number of people actually interacting with or retweeting his posts was close to zero. Most of the following accounts were suspected to be fake accounts created by a paid party, and used solely to increase the number of followers for people like Dave Peck. The article briefly sites that the motivation for this action was to “enhance online reputation”, but this type of falsification is closely related to topics we’ve covered in class, specifically social avalanches, and can be analyzed more deeply.
Twitter is one part of the large abstract web that is the online social media playing field. One thing that has emerged as an important characteristic on that field is one’s social impact, usually measured by the number of people who follow you, interact with you, or spread your thoughts. Klout is one of the examples of an attempt to mathematically calculate one’s social impact. But in this case, the question arises of why Peck would pay for fake followers, when they don’t actually benefit him in any direct way. The answer can be found in the nature of social avalanches: When a real person stumbles across Peck’s page, they will see that 225,000 other people truly care about what he has to say, and actively choose to follow him on Twitter. That amounts to 225,000 viewed choices to consider when making your decision. And due to the cascade effect, you have a much higher probability of choosing to follow Peck as well. Because of that action, Peck just acquired one more REAL follower, which actually does directly benefit him, through the use of his fake followers. Once he reaches a critical number of followers, which can be thought of as a threshold, future people who consider following him will want to join the rest of his followers and choose to follow him as well, causing the cascade effect. Of course the difficult part is amassing enough followers to reach that threshold and trigger the cascade in the first place. But in this case, Peck found a sneaky way around that problem: pay for fake followers to reach the threshold he wanted.