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ethics Guide

Synthetic FriendS

You’ve just been hired as a marketing man- accounts that leave URLs and discount codes in their com-
ager for a national clothing retailer. Your boss has made it ments. This is buggy, but it helps push up your follower
crystal clear that your predecessor was fired because she count, and that might mean more real followers.
couldn’t get any traction with the company’s social media Then comes the purge. Only a few months into your
campaign. He wants results—soon. This is your dream job, campaign, Instagram starts deleting bots! You lose about
and you don’t want to lose it. 2,000 followers overnight. Ouch. But you still have loads
You read an online news article about a person who of fictitious followers left. Justin Bieber had the worst
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bought an army of bots that would follow him on Instagram. hit—3.5 million followers deleted in one day. Other
This could immediately inflate your follower count and show celebrities lost millions of followers as well. You check
your boss that you’re making real progress. Of course, the the news, and it looks like nearly every company, actor,
bots wouldn’t be real followers, but if your follower count singer, politician, and popular user on Instagram lost
goes up, it might be easier to attract real human followers. followers. You immediately get a sinking feeling in the
People like popular people. pit of your stomach. What if you’re not the only one who
You do some searching and find an online forum bought followers?
where users are bragging about how realistic their bots
are. You even find Web sites
(click farms) that advertise
Facebook “likes” for sale. You
decide to spend $100 and see
what happens. You end up
getting 15,000 followers that
slowly trickle in over the next
couple weeks. Not bad. Not
bad at all. Real progress that
you can show your boss. Well,
maybe not “real” progress.
But at least it’s progress.
You start looking at the
profiles of your newly minted
synthetic friends and find that
they’re pretty easy to identify.
They only put one word in
their name field. But the pho-
tos, names, and other content
look very believable. You also
notice that you’ve started to
attract annoying spammy
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