Let me say something that might be unpopular, I don't think buying fake followers is the worst thing a person can do, i really don't, so In a world where perception is practically currency, where the first thing anybody checks before taking you seriously is how many people are already taking you seriously, I understand why someone would want to inflate those numbers, the logic is almost clean: look bigger, get bigger, use the illusion to buy yourself into the rooms that the illusion eventually makes real, i get it.
But here is where my sympathy ends .... the moment it stops being a personalstrategy and starts becoming a shared reality that the rest of us are expected to live inside.
Because that is what is actually happening, it is not just people padding their own numbers in private, It is those numbers going out into the world and shaping how other people think, what other people believe, and what other people do with their own money, time, and attention, that is where it stops being a harmless little shortcut and starts being something with actual consequences.
Think about it .... a brand sees an influencer with four hundred thousand followers and a decent engagement rate and they sign a deal, they pay real money sometimes a lot of it.... for access to an audience that does not fully exist , the campaign goes out, the numbers come back disappointing, the brand blames their product, their strategy, their team, nobody thinks to ask whether the audience was real to begin with, that brand just got robbed, technically, and the person who robbed them didn't even have to lie out loud, the numbers did it quietly.
Or see, take it in a different direction , a new artist that is trying to figure out who to study, who is actually making it, and whose path makes sense to follow, they see someone with massive streams and assume that the music is connecting, that there is something tthere that is worth paying attention to, they adjust their own work toward that sound, that style, but those streams were bought, the connection was manufactured, they just spent months chasing a signal that was not real in the first place
That is the part that seriously unsettles me not the act itself in isolation, but what it does to the environment around it, It makes it genuinely very hard to tell what is real, and then when you can not tell what is real, you just stop trusting your own instincts about quality, about talent, about what is actually resonating, everything starts to feel rigged because quietly, some of it is.
Should it be criminalised though? Honestly, I am not sure the law is the right tool here, It would be nearly impossible to enforce, and there is something slightly absurd about imagining someone in court over Instagram followers, but I do think platforms have a much bigger responsibility than they are currently taking, If fake numbers are distorting the entire ecosystem you built, that is your problem to fix aggressively, not something to quietly tolerate because inflated metrics make your platform look more active than it is.
What I know for certain is this , the practice is building a world where nothing quite adds up, and people can feel that even when they can't name it, they scroll and something feels off, they wonder why things that seem massive don't actually feel alive, that unease is the cost of a culture that decided appearance was more valuable than reality.
The numbers are lying, and the longer we pretend they aren't, the harder it gets to find anything true underneath them.
Image Credit : ChatGpt
