False friends
In late August 2012, Facebook announced that it would take action against “like” fraud—that is, “likes” that were purchased rather than resulting from a genuine interest in a person. But it’s not just on Facebook that people cheat with fake friends; popularity and visibility are also faked on Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms. By Manuel P. Nappo, Program Director of the CAS in Social Media Management at HWZ and Chief Networking Officer at Centralway. www.about.me/mpn
The principle is actually simple: various agencies offer to buy likes, friends or followers for relatively little money. Behind the fake friends are either bots, i.e. automatically generated profiles that are not real people, or real people who receive money for their activities. Recently, strange videos or links have also been circulating. If you look at these, you automatically become a fan of a page without realizing it. Another tricky aspect of buying friends is that anyone can buy friends and assign/give them to any profile without their consent.
Fake friends can often be recognized by the fact that a large number of new friends are added within a short period of time, often with identical account creation dates. The profiles come from distant countries, and automatically generated profiles show little or no personal activity.
The primary interest in more friends, fans and ratings is the increased popularity and notoriety that is feigned. This may also explain why politicians and political parties have recently been accused of buying fake friends. In politics in particular, there is a lot of discussion about popularity in the run-up to elections. Comparisons of follower numbers are now commonplace for the media. However, if it comes to light that fake friends have been bought in, this does not exactly have a positive effect on a candidate. Even if they may not have acted themselves, but the fake friends were planted by someone else.
Ultimately, fake friends are of little use in social media, as new media thrive on interaction, but fake friends are usually silent and inactive. In the meantime, however, you can already buy interaction: YouTube views and retweets, also available for cash. However, fake friends are not useful here either, they just make statistics look prettier, although they ultimately falsify these figures. What good are fake friends on social media if the real supporters in real life don't go to the ballot box and vote for a politician after all? Once again, it's like in real life: imagine a hall with 500 people attending your event. However, 400 of them have paid to attend and only 100 are your real prospects. Neither you nor the real prospects will feel comfortable.
Social media thrive on dialog. You should take care of those people who have a genuine interest and promote exchange and strengthen trust rather than aiming to quantitatively accumulate friends.
