Everyone wants to be popular online.
Some even pay for it.
Inside social media’s black market.
It seems the New York Times has just discovered that you can buy followers on social media networks. This isn’t news; this has been the case for years. I get spam on Twitter offering followers all the time; almost every time I post a photo on Instagram, I get followed by an account whose profile offers to sell me followers.
Celebrities and brands have been doing this for years. Why did it take so long for the mainstream media to find out about this.
Here’s a 2014 Macworld article by Caitlin McGarry about Instagram’s “spam purge” of that period. There are dozens, hundreds of articles about this.