Fame. Popularity. They are certainly two of the greatest engines of the Internet. There are many cases of people who have achieved this through hard work and effort. From independent bloggers to developers of widely used applications. But there are many ways… Not all are genuine
What I’ve found is people like Santiago Swallow:
A sum up of his twitter account:
- Speaker, writer and thinker
- It has 85,000+ followers on Twitter
- His account is verified
- Specialist “reimagining self in the online age”
- He born in Mexico but he is living in USA
- He has participated in the conference TED
- It has been a hit at SXSW (South by Southwest)
- He has a fairly detailed page on Wikipedia
- He is about to publish a book “Self: imaginary identities in the age of the Internet”
Something impressive! But is that real? Not by mistake.
Santiago Swallow was created in 2 hours by Kevin Ashton reporter for an article published in Quarz . It cost $ 68. It’s completely fictional in detail. No specialist in anything, no book, no TED conference, no SXSW.
Ashton purchased 90,000 Twitter followers for $ 50. He paid 18 for the site and domainWordPress.com . He generated the name of Santiago Swallow with an application for writers that can generate random names under certain criteria. He used software available on the Internet to build and publish tweets every minute from certain phrases and themes shortlisted . His tweets are like “Before you lose weight, find hope” and “To write is to live endlessly.” In addition, he generated the face of Santiago combining 3 photos taken from Google Images, so that a search will never show duplicates. And the verification seal Twitter just was put on its cover image at the right place. All that remained was to make his biography.
And that’s how a couple of hours you can have a pretty compelling profile of an expert.
The problem of fake followers is serious, because this generates a significant level of noise and it disturbs the activity statistics of twitter followers. But mostly sadly illustrates the common principle on the web that mentioned at the beginning.