Likes, follows and reviews were and still are important markers of trust on social media – until people figured out you can simply buy fake engagement. Researchers at the University of Luxembourg are mapping "Fake activity stores" and uncovering a network of illicit activity that not only enables fraud and disinformation on a huge scale, but also threatens the internet as we know it.
Engagement is the currency of the internet. Whether it is a political campaign, the launch of a new movie or influencer-fueled guerrilla marketing of some product: Getting some eyeballs on your content is the best way of nudging the "algorithm" into recommending it to even more people. But it's not only about pushing content to the top of the recommended pages. For the longest time, people have relied on engagement as social proof: Anything popular can't be that bad… right?
But the days of slow and steady growth are long gone. Seeing accounts with millions of followers or products with thousands of reviews barely registers as impressive anymore. The tedious prospect of slowly accruing a following is of little interest to actors – sometimes with dubious goals – looking for fast growth.
So what is a prospective influencer, online-shop or troll-farm to do? Buy some likes to kickstart the process, of course. A quick search on the internet reveals dozens, hundreds of sites that sell likes, followers or views at discount prices – with several hundred or even thousands likes costing as little as a few Euros. With the "Famous"-Project, (Fake Activity Market Observation System of Unethical Services), researchers at the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with the University of Newcastle, have decided to try to map this underground ecosystem.
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