Information cascade and buying twitter followers
There have been a whole host of companies that have popped up (like http://buy1000followers.co/) that allow people to buy twitter followers. Basically for a nominal amount of money, around $5, one can buy themselves thousands of “followers.” These followers are sometimes random real people, from all parts of the world, and sometimes just bots, i.e computer programs, that follow whoever their overlords tell them to. There is no social connection between these followers and you or even each other. These followers do not tweet helpful things at you or contribute to your life in any way besides increasing your follower count. So then why would someone ever pay money to have thousands of computers or random people across the world follow them on twitter and then do nothing else? Information cascade.
Twitter is a big social network. New connections are being made all the time, interesting information is being shared and propagated through the network, and in reference to this post people are trying to figure out who is “hot” to follow. People are always on the search for the next big thing and are looking to be early adopters. Being able to be one of the first people to follow someone before they were “twitter famous” is a great example of how information cascade can help explain these companies. Other people only follower others who seem like they have something interesting to say and they can check that by user’s follower count since that reflects how “important” the network considers that person.
If a new user starts getting enough momentum/validation from the network, even if it is contrived, other people will assume that the network has validated them, because of their follower count, and start following them. The thousands of fake followers can signal to the network that you are “noteworthy” and should be paid attention to. Thus buying a large cohort of fake followers is a great way to use the concept of information cascade to your advantage and build up a large legitimate following.