Until I stopped following someone I used to follow on Instagram with over 100,000 followers, and when he called for an event to take place, he was not even able to gather up to 40 people during one of his events early this year. Not that he did not have the following momentum, advertising, and promoting the event. He did the promotion heavily because he always posted it on his story and some of his platforms. Yet during the event, a lot of seats were empty, and after the event had happened, I saw a video of him trying to explain about the timing and venue while his comments section stayed respectfully quiet about what everyone had already understood.
In my head, and while I was alone, the thought about that empty room crossed my mind. Not with satisfaction, but with a feeling that was closer to recognition.
When the discussion about those with fake followers comes up, it always focuses on those who get deceived from the outside. A lot of brands usually gives money to some influencer that doesn't exist. I have followed some persons on Instagram all because they had followers, and I believed that those numbers represented genuine trust. And in the long run, some of these things are real harms. And one of the things that most people just assume or will never talk about it openly is the gradual damage that running a fake number does to the person behind it.
Trying to purchase fake followers or an audience is synonymous with breaking that person's own ability to come up with something real that will work for their work in a very honest way. Such a person's metric and algorithm turn to noise. And they might not be able to tell what actually connects with real people because the data includes thousands of accounts that will never feel anything about what you create. Just ghost accounts.
And then, they might end up working on plans that do not even exist in the first place because they have invested in the wrong place that a phantom audience validated, thereby moving in the direction that no real person ever endorsed..
And personally, this is not his dishonesty towards the rest of the world. It is a self inflicted blindness that compounds without noticing over time.
Some people will say fake it until you make it. And this is exactly what some have been doing because they want to look successful, hoping that it will open doors that talent sometimes cannot. In this case scenario, having an inflated follower signal social proof to a brand manager who does not look closely. And it gives room for more momentum in an environment where momentum attracts more momentum. The architecture underneath this is sand, and the logic is not stupid.
At the end of everything, they all know that it is always an empty room. It might not be as punishment, though. But simply as reality reasserting itself at a moment that the individual chose not to prepare for.
Having fake followers, streams does more than deceiving those who don't know they are fake. It also in the long run decieved the person behind such account completely that real feedback stops being recognizeble.
The 100,000 couldn't fill 40 seats. And somewhere on their phone right now, the count is still climbing.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI
