In today's society, one of the few ways to get in touch with clients and customer for business owners and those who offer other professional services, is through the internet. We have all kinds of services that offers more visibility for businesses, this has made people depend on internet. It is cheaper to use and doesn't necessarily require an expert as long you know your way around.
Compared to those days when, the only way to gain visibility is through advert, which can be through radio, television, newspaper and magazine. These advertising mediums are not cheap and I haven't discussed about agency fees. It is easier for bigger corporations to make use of it since they have the funds to get it done. But for startups, the reality is quite different. They struggle with finances, which plays a big role in stabilizing a business.
So, instead of paying huge fees for advertisment to gain visibility, there are lot of platforms that can be accessed through the internet, that offer free visibility. All you have to do is create an account and do the needful. We have platforms like Google business profile, which allows people to place their business on the map and gain international visibility. We also have playstore, for the tech gurus.
The biggest of all is social media, with the way people depend on social media for information, it has become a reliable platform to reach out to people. With the help of it, we have people building career as social media as influencers, streamers e.t.c they create content that gain traction, with the monetisation features attached to most social media platforms, we have people acquiring wealth. It has become a lot easier to make money without relying on physical jobs.
As beautiful as this might sound, technological advancements did not stop there. We now have bots that obey commands, making the usage of internet a lot better than before. With it comes a new kind of issue, we have lot of bots out there, each with its own function. While some help in searching the internet to get preferred content, we have others that assist content creators, businesses, media personnel, streamers in generating fake likes, views e.t.c It might seem harmless but it is not.
Likes might just be a thing for fun but that is not what it is meant for. Likes is a proof that people enjoy watching or reading content. It can be a picture, video, meme, whatever it is, through the numbers of likes on a post, it proves the usefulness, authenticity, credibility. It is a form of feedback from the audience. In a world where these can be generated using bots, there is almost no way of verifying audience approval of a content.
Is this hurting people? yes it is. This might be harmless for content creators, their views is only means to get paid on social media. Depending on the kind of content created, if it is educational or informative content, generating likes for such a content is fraud. Because most people tends to judge content based on the amount of likes it has, people perceive the information to be true since a lot of people likes the content. This is why X (Twitter) added a feature called community note, this allows people to inform others about the dubious nature of the content.
What about business profiles that generates fake followers, likes e.t.c Doing this plays on the intelligence of potential clients/customers. Those numbers are meant to prove the authenticity of the business or person, by doing so, such person or business have successfully mislead people, which is not different from fraud. We also have fake reviews, fake feedbacks on platforms like playstore. These things mislead people into believing such app is legit without knowing it is all fake.
Should this be consider a criminal offense? I believe so. If not, it becomes extremely difficult to accept that some content, people, business are authentic. This becomes an issue for people who are truly genuine because those with fake everything have changed the perspective of people. It will become difficult for people with genuine likes, followers, views to claim credibility because people won't believe what they have to be true.
This write-up was inspired by weekly featured content titled It's all fake in hive learners community.
Cover Image - generated using chatgpt
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