About a year ago, Instagram blogger Sara Melotti published an article titled "Instagram Created a Monster", alleging massive fraud among so-called "influencers" on that platform.
A year later, she re-visits the situation, and finds it's worse than ever.
In an accompanying article, "INSTAGRAM CREATED A MONSTER 2 - Frauds, an epidemic of fake influencers and the death of Meritocracy", she writes:
Things in the platform changed dramatically over the past year and today’s instagram world is a very very scary scenario: fake influencers, black markets, scams, an epidemic of fake likes and comments and inflated engagement. The degree of trickery reached a point where nothing is believable anymore and with millions of dollars invested in Influencer marketing the word FRAUD is not an exaggeration anymore but an urgent matter that needs to be addressed.
I’m writing this for you and for my fellow creatives that are feeling incredibly discouraged by how things are going. I’m writing this because it’s time to talk about it. I’m writing this because I’m sick of seeing unfairness across the platform and I’m sick of living in a world where meritocracy is becoming a utopia; good people are being robbed, scumbags are getting rich and talented artists are pushed away from a world that wouldn’t exist without them. It’s the wild west out there today, we’ve created a terrifying fraudulent ecosystem and if we do nothing about it, we’re setting ourselves up for failure as a society.
There's much more at the link. It makes for very interesting reading, not least because a lot of what she says applies to social media across the board, not just to Instagram. Recommended.
Peter
Weird.. the embedded video is blurred out on my chrome browser. If I open in the incognito window it works fine...
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I shared this with a couple students I'm mentoring, who are working on a software project related to this. It'll be an eye-opener to discuss after they're done with their current phase and have locked down the code.
ReplyDeleteWhat blows me away is the stuff I've seen on how much some of these bimbos make for their soft-core porn on Instagram. It's well into the six figures and I wouldn't be surprised at some hitting seven. I'm not sure who buys the products they are advertising but some companies must think they get a positive ROI from this.
ReplyDeleteMy GMail addy (which I don't actually use for anything important) is apparently on some compromised-emails list. I regularly get "confirm your order" and "confirm your subscription" type emails, which I mostly ignore (because I've discovered almost no companies are interested when informed of fraud attempts).
ReplyDeleteOne day I got one from Instagram: Here is your link to reset your forgotten password.
But I'd never signed up with Instagram.
Well, I can teach one idiot a lesson: I used the link to sign in, then changed the password. Also changed the account description to something like "Don't steal other folks' email, and you won't lose your account access."
So now I have an Instagram account. Useful as tits on a boar, but still, there it is. One of these days I should get around to deleting its existing content.
[I'm told the idiot made a new account using his regular handle, which comes up elsewhere. GMail accounts are free, why the hell even try to use what's not yours?? I can tell you: because some companies pay PER EMAIL that signs up, confirmed or not.]
Speaking therewhich, can't post on Blogspot-anything unless I use the Hated Chrome (otherwise I can't get past reCAPTCHA). Gee, I wonder why that is...
@JNorth
ReplyDeleteThe bimbos don't make much money for softcore porn. A few might, through advertising rags and shit.
Peanuts: the real money is in what the softcore porn advertises:
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/the-rise-of-instagram-prostitution/