This doesn't come as a surprise; I was able to buy 1 MILLION fake followers on Instagram. The account is still alive and well.
I've been meaning to write a blog post regarding this endeavor. But moreso, I've come to the conclusion that social media needs to have verifiable audits for their userbase; similar to how there are audits done for financials. A lot of the value of these companies IS derived from their DAU/MAU and or userbase in general (example: WhatsApp - $19 billion for their 1 billion users).
I've bought a small amount of twitter followers ($10-$20) for a meme account once. They disappeared over the course of a month or two. Checking online that's what happens with the majority of services.
You expect them to ban you based on your account gaining fake followers? Wouldn't such a policy make it very easy for any third party to get a user banned?
I assumed that someone would, at the very minimum, notice that my account went from 150 to 1,000,000 followers in less than a month, and then ban the bogus followers, as they are fairly easy to identify. That didn't happen
I did this solely to collect data for a personal project I am doing. My last post (on Instagram) had 10 views, so from that standpoint, I gained nothing, however, I did learn lots of valuable insight into the realm of fake followers for which I will make a blog entry detailing my findings soon.
I intended to imply that daily/monthly active users ARE the value for many businesses. Facebook valued WhatsApp's 1 billion DAU/MAU at $19 billion despite the fact that WhatsApp was not producing any cashflow.
I've been meaning to write a blog post regarding this endeavor. But moreso, I've come to the conclusion that social media needs to have verifiable audits for their userbase; similar to how there are audits done for financials. A lot of the value of these companies IS derived from their DAU/MAU and or userbase in general (example: WhatsApp - $19 billion for their 1 billion users).