This article brought up so many issues. The whole ridiculousness/awfulness of social media, and the absurdity of the idea that it means something real: you have people being labeled “influencers” directly getting paid for the number of followers they (supposedly) have, you have actors getting jobs because of their (supposed) followers, writers getting contracts, etc., and you have this notion that you can learn about people by looking them up on social media (when odds are, their identity has been stolen and recycled multiple times, so you’re more likely to find a fake account than their actual one). Then there’s Twitter’s relaxed attitude about this - it undermines the very nature of social media, but they too rely on inflated counts, of those using Twitter.
Man, the hilarious sleaziness of the follower-farm and its CEO - a overblown fake resume, a business with a fake address; it’s just on the edge of being outright criminal, only being saved by the fact that it seems they rent the bot accounts from other people who engage in the outright identity theft. Though the business still presents itself as being approved by Twitter, when it overtly violates the TOS.
It’s not like Facebook is any better, either. The whole idea of using metrics from social media to gauge popularity is laughable.
The wonderful absurdity is that it’s not just ego-stroking, but people actually get paid to flog products based purely on how many Twitter followers they have (except they actually don’t). I was reading something a while back that indicated that actors were getting cast in movies because of their follower numbers. People are taking the money they receive because they have fake followers and use a fraction of that money to buy those followers. It makes perfect sense, except the bit where anyone would offer deals based on grossly unreliable social media follower numbers.
Yeah, exactly - this kind of thing rots out Twitter from the inside, but Twitter are, effectively, just as much beneficiaries of these services as the people who pay for them.
