What if we told you that a lot of social media success was actually built on deception? From fake social media followers and “follower factories” to algorithm manipulation and persuasive technology, social media is designed to hijack our attention and get our views and clicks, no matter the cost to us. If you’ve ever questioned your social media feed, chased more likes or a higher follower count, or wondered why you feel addicted to social media, you need to read this.
See Tricked by Followers and Badges by Tim O’Hearn for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.
Tim O’Hearn is the author of the recently-published book Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media. In it, he talks about his experience as someone who grew up with the internet, became a programmer, and broke the rules to get customers millions of followers. He’s made money from the internet, sure. But he also feels like it’s affected him, too. After years as a software engineer working in quantitative trading and his work growing social media follower counts for others, he wrote this book to shed some more light on deception in social media.
The History of Social Media Follower Counts
A surprising amount of today’s quest for more followers relates to internet spam. The book Spam Kings talks about how it became much cheaper to send digital messages than junk mail, and some percentage of people will reliably buy products, even though the products are often scams themselves. Bots popped up towards the end of the MySpace era.
When Instagram became popular a few years later, followers became the primary goal. It wasn’t a direct sales pitch anymore. Instead, more followers, increasing metrics, and digital insignias like the infamous blue checkmark were what mattered.
[Social media] was no longer a direct sales pitch. Rather, it was this race for more followers, growing those digital metrics. – Tim O’Hearn
Followers were social proof in a general sense. Especially in 2018, if you ended up on a profile that had 20,000 followers, you’d assume they were a legitimate business or a smaller but somewhat successful influencer. And if you are the owner of that account, there’s value in higher numbers. Assuming they aren’t all fake social media followers, if you sell them something, some of them should convert. The quest for more followers came from a dual assumption. First, if you have more followers, more people are likely to follow you because you’ve been socially proven. And second, existing followers are more likely to purchase products that you sell.
Deceptive Tactics to Increase Social Media Followers
There are two primary approaches to gaining more social media followers. The first is spammier. Essentially, it’s using botnets to create fake social media followers. If you could industrially create thousands of fake accounts, you could put a price on using those accounts to follow customers, get them more likes and comments, or things like that. The price ranged from about fifty cents to a dollar per account, so that could add up fast.
By the time Tim started working at Shark Social, the social media growth business he was involved with, it was very difficult to create fake accounts. He had tools to do it, but they didn’t do it as much. Shark Social focused more on organic growth. Instead of paying for so many followers, people would give Shark Social that money. They would log into the account, target accounts that were likely to be interested, and interact with them. The goal was to get reciprocal interactions, especially follows. The reciprocation rate on social media is about 10%. If a company could follow 300 people a day and get 30 followers back, that’s a decent amount of followers per month. Many people and companies were happy to pay for that.
Shark Social was one of many companies using these tactics. And they were all breaking the social media platforms’ terms of service. It wasn’t a secret. They got around it by being careful with language—using generic terms, not running ads directly, and not admitting to using bots—and hoping it would be enough. Many of these companies got cease and desist letters, but Shark Social didn’t. They flew below the radar because they weren’t making as much money as other companies.
Hiding the Traffic
An important part of these tactics is obscuring where the traffic actually came from. Running a thousand accounts from a basement in New Jersey is suspicious, so whether you’re creating fake social media followers or committing crimes, you need to mask those tracks.
Early on, Shark Social experimented with residential IPs, with remote posts at Tim’s parents’ house and a few other places. This scaled poorly, but it worked for a while because residential IPs are high-quality. Eventually, they had to change to proxies, and tried all sorts of things. Tim ended up designing a system in AWS that more or less spun up EC2 instances on demand to use as proxies. AWS publishes their IP range and the trustworthiness is pretty low, but since Tim only put one or two accounts on these proxies, it worked decently.
Challenges for Fake Social Media Follower Services
It is harder now for services like Shark Social to grow customers’ accounts these days, whether or not they’re using fake social media followers to do it. A lot of social media platforms are trying to limit that behavior. But on the other hand, of all the bad things that can happen on social media, these services are a lower priority. As long as they don’t scale excessively, many platforms are willing to tolerate a little spam.
Lots of businesses have been built on violating platforms’ terms of use. Shark Social violated terms of use all the time, and they were just one of dozens of companies using the same tactics. In his book, Tim discusses a company that offered a service monitoring employees’ LinkedIn activity to predict if they might be about to quit. Scraping LinkedIn like that violates the terms of use.
In one of the later chapters of the book, Tim also talks about botfarms, which are botnets similar to those used for the original DDoS attacks. Whether the idea is controlling a bunch of fake social media accounts for follower growth or a bunch of PCs for nefarious purposes, they’re not all that different. The value proposition has just changed. Botnets can still be used for destructive attacks, definitely. But they’re also incredibly valuable when used for social media.
Fake social media followers and similar tactics are a violation of the terms of use on almost every social media platform. In 2019, Instagram said they were going to start removing fake followers from these services. Instagram is good at identifying where followers are from. But even if they get it wrong and ban you for being a fake account on accident, there’s not much you can do. You’re always eligible for a ban, and you don’t have a lot of rights or options if you do.
You don’t have a particularly strong set of rights or recourse if your account is banned on a social media site. – Tim O’Hearn
Tim also addresses this in his book. What do you do if your account gets banned or shadowbanned? There’s an entire industry of account recovery scams now. They’ll claim they can get you your account back, but all they’ll really do is scam you. The only thing Tim managed to confirm was genuine is that certain states have legal services that people have successfully used to lobby social media companies to reinstate their accounts.
Whether the decision to ban you was arbitrary or for good cause, it’s a huge challenge to get it back. You may not be able to. If your account is verified, popular, has a long post history, or has lots of followers, it’s not worth risking a ban just for a few more followers. Tim has worked with people who got banned on TikTok, created a new account, and got the new account got banned before they even posted. It’s way more advanced than many non-technical people think. And if you lose an account that’s important to you, you may end up in a recovery scam, where everything is over-promised and nobody can actually help you.
How Social Media Exploits Users
After he started writing Framed, Tim was offered an opportunity to lead the special projects team at a social network startup. He calls it “Cutlet” in the book. His career included a lot of programing around the financial and retail trading spaces, so he had a lot of experience in similar areas. But they didn’t want him to tell them how to build things in the trading space. Instead, they wanted him to work with user data to build persuasive technology systems. It was such a unique experience that he gave it a chapter in the book.
What he ended up building was a feed. It was largely based around Reddit, but also included other sources and internal features. Then he worked on push notifications. The only success metric that mattered to Cutlet was how many people clicked on that push notification. There were no rules or guidelines. Tim could send whatever notifications he wanted, as long as people clicked. He has no push notifications on his phone at all, so he was shocked by how often he could annoy users before they started uninstalling. Performance wasn’t based on attracting new users, but manipulating existing users to spend more time on the app.
In a way, Tim considers himself a survivor of the very tactics he has used to manipulate social media users. He was born in the 1990s and grew up with the internet. He did some things in the right way and so avoided the worst of it, but he’s seen many people consumed by social media and its unhealthy psychological impacts.
Changes in the Internet
Tim still remembers the dopamine rush of coming home from school and logging in to MySpace to see a comment or friend request. Even when using Reddit a few years later, he remembers coming home and enjoying the high-quality information aggregation on the site. Fifteen years later, he’s still online and seeking what he once found. We can all agree that the quality is largely no longer there.
Ironically, though he wrote a book about the dark side of social media, friends and peers tell him that he could easily become an influencer if he promoted it on TikTok the right way. It’s compelling, because if you write a book, you want more people to read it, and Tim is interested in getting the word out. But he’s very cynical about the whole thing. Even though he ran a business on Instagram, by the end of it, he was only logging on with burner accounts, rather than his personal one.
Tim is still impressed with and excited by the things the internet age has given us. There is a lot of potential and a lot of possibility in the technology. But it’s not quite where it should be. Social media does make sense to Tim. He uses LinkedIn, and Facebook is great for checking birthdays. But a lot of the more addictive ones, like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, do more harm than good.
I am so impressed and I’m so enthralled with what the internet age has provided for us. But we’re not quite there. – Tim O’Hearn
Using Caution on Social Media
If you’re a business owner, people are always going to sell you something. Once, it was SEO. Then it was content, then post scheduling, and now AI. Fake social media follower services will always be out there. Tim has worked with these services, and they can be useful. If your business doesn’t have a Google listing or the hours are wrong, it’s probably worth paying someone to update that.
But frequent posting and actually getting more customers don’t necessarily connect. People just don’t use social media that way. Especially if you’re a brick-and-mortar business, investing heavily in social media just might not make a lot of sense. If you’re a business owner, take a minute to think before you do too much on social media. It may not make sense.
A lot of success comes down to what Tim calls “getting good.” There’s almost always somebody out there better than you. And a lot of talent isn’t necessarily worthy of being global. Posting probably won’t bring you to the promised land of success – at least not without paying for ads at the very least. Do what makes you happy. There are still opportunities out there if you don’t use social media much.
I still think that there are some cool opportunities out there by being a very minimal, only as needed social media user. – Tim O’Hearn
Get a copy of Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media on Amazon, where it’s currently being sold at cost. An audiobook should be available by the end of the summer. It is also available through other major retailers. If you want to connect with Tim, you can find him on LinkedIn, on his newsletter on Beehiiv at timohearn.beehiiv.com, or on his personal blog, tjohearn.com.
