Influencer cartels manipulate social media

A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers to follow you.<p>The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone&#x27;s content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a &quot;celebrity&quot;, that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.<p>Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren&#x27;t engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.<p>It&#x27;s common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.<p>It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes &#x2F; comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes &#x2F; comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.<p>While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.<p>Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.<p>Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business &#x2F; brand.

I sometimes see certain memes related to some corporate content pick up a ton of traction online and can&#x27;t help but wonder if they&#x27;re organic or manufactured. Spreading subtle ads through memes is probably still an under-explored area of marketing and it bypasses modern ad-blocking techniques. The way I learned of Invincible was through a couple memes, which eventually lead me to research and watch the series.<p>To give a concrete example of another trend: a few years back there was this group trend on TikTok of going to the theater dressed up in a suit to watch some animated movie. You would only need to pay a couple of large accounts to engage in this trend, and then others will follow along because they want to fit in.<p>Another dimension through which content marketing will probably expand in the future is by creating media that encourages people to take sides and engage in discussions, like Giant Monkey vs Giant Reptile, who wins? This trend is very popular within the political landscape, but it could probably be twisted for fictional IPs as well.

I&#x27;ve noticed that in my hobby (guitar), all the influencers will release the same equipment reviews at the exact same time. They often refer to each other, and do co-labs. Lots of &quot;my buddy&quot; referrals, so to speak...<p>As for the first point, that&#x27;s just how marketing works these days. All the big influencers will get the equipment weeks before, test it out, and make reviews with the clause that they can&#x27;t say anything about it until the agreed time. It of course feels highly coordinated, and those new releases absolutely dominate the social media, when the release&#x2F;drop happens.<p>Then all the smaller influencers will feed off that, and drop their own reviews the next days &#x2F; weeks, or whenever they get the equipment.<p>At one point, one starts to think - is it all authentic, or just made-up stuff to increase views, affiliate sales, etc.<p>(This, of course, pales in comparison to the teen&#x2F;beauty&#x2F;etc. influencers, that will band together in a shared house, create PR friendships purely to pump up numbers, etc.)

&gt; Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience &gt; Back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on regression analysis) show that if advertisers pay for cartel engagement as if it were natural engagement, they receive only 3–18% of the value with general cartels, and 60–85% with topic cartels.<p>First, users don&#x27;t benefit from cartel engagement at all. The authors have forgotten to factor in opportunity costs of 100%. A &quot;85% good&quot; engagement that pushes a 100% engagement from my feed costs me 15%. This is plainly obvious by, well, the need to form a cartel in the first place.<p>Second, the authors define both good engagement and topic cartels by comment similarity. You can&#x27;t get any other result other than that topic cartels beat general cartels.<p>Third, the column uses stuffy language. Write clearly and you spot mistakes such as one and two more easily.<p>Fourth, as a regular app user I regard everything influencer-shilled as negative welfare – but that&#x27;s just my opinion.

This has existed since the whole ‘influencer’ phenomenon began, particularly on social media. I recall reading an article in 2014 about how Samsung allegedly spread slander against HTC. It’s the reason why I don’t rely on YouTube for reviews, tutorials, or anything beyond pure entertainment or documentaries. It seems that everyone is compensated in one way or another. In fact, monetization is the reason why social media has devolved into this state.

Figure 1 in this post, showing algorithmically enforced collusion in the cartel, is shocking to me as someone who hasn&#x27;t spent any time on Instagram.<p>The authors of the blog post describe their analysis in detail in the &quot;companion paper&quot; on arXiv: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2405.10231" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2405.10231</a>

The whole setup also rewards influencers with questionable moral compasses.<p>One of the ones I’m following is trying to find sponsors that pay a their workers a fair wage. Self imposed requirements like that murder the size pool of potential sponsor matches.<p>So what do you tell them? Lower your ethical standards to pay rent? Entire setup has crappy incentive alignment

I feel like this has existed for all of the early influencers who continue to peddle their mediocre NYT mostly self-help bestsellers. Probably even to name a name, something that Ryan Holiday infamously wrote about early in his publishing career.<p>I knew a person who did some type of manipulation for their TikTok up to 550k followers in 2020-2021. They would average maybe 2k views a video(thus horrible engagement), but they would dupe many advertisers for thousands of dollars to &quot;reach 550k followers&quot; by peddling all sorts of useless products.<p>I believe this pattern is very rampant in social media and heavily manipulated, especially today for stuff nobody wants to buy but platforms are pushing consumerism&#x2F;advertising. I wrote a book on how ridiculous social media is nowadays called &quot;Enough&quot;. If anyone wants a free copy, feel free to send me an email.

Basically, swindlers swindling swindlers. Advertising industry is not some paragon of ethics; it shouldn&#x27;t be surprised that people who deceive others for a living will use the same techniques within industry as they use on regular people.

The world is turning into Two Moments of Invention by every day.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewhemming.ca&#x2F;cheeseburger_brown&#x2F;stories&#x2F;Two_Moments_of_Invention.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewhemming.ca&#x2F;cheeseburger_brown&#x2F;stories&#x2F;Two_Mome...</a>

Everyone is trying to manipulate everything. It’s the age of grift.<p>Go on any social media website and you’ll be used as means to an end in many ways: ads will be shown to you for ad revenue, you will be tracked so your data can be sold, the platforms will expose you to content that drives addiction, and to content that aligns with their politics. On top of that, influencers will try to sell their sponsor’s products through parasocial relationships with you. In between all that, dark patterns will mislead you to buy more subscriptions, and community guidelines will commodify any social interaction you desire into an ad-friendly non-controversial synthetic content. All that will be used to train an LLM or two, potentially stealing your art and your career. Your data will eventually leak and your identity will be used as means to an end on the black market, to enable further grifts like identity theft, phishing and scamming. And if you dare have any other monetizable human desires, like dating, they will be monetized even if they never needed to be. And the money everyone made from you will be used to lobby against you. All to ensure the next generation — your kids — is exploited as means to an end more effectively, from a younger age. And just in case there isn’t enough grift and someone comes up with a new method, EULAs can change without notice at any time to enshittify the grift more.<p>It’s just layers of grift modeled around a minimum viable products. It’s grift on grift on grift… all the way down.

Gerald Undone made video addressing issue of influencers and camera industry recently.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_7c4ZbBzqK0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_7c4ZbBzqK0</a>

this is like a decade late to notice this technique, but, yes, that market has matured a bit more since then, but mostly in the size of the budgets

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manipulate and influence are similar. So why are people offended?<p>Influencers get paid for influencing&#x2F;manipulating people. You now got the concept. If that upsets you, you are kind of slow.

&gt; If a cartel generates engagement from influencers with other interests (meat lovers), this hurts consumers and advertisers. It hurts consumers because the platform will show them irrelevant content, and advertisers are hurt because their ads are shown to the wrong audience.<p>Even when the content is relevant it still hurts consumers because ads are manipulation, and supports a system of invasive spying that gets used for things far outside of the scope of advertising, and because it only shows consumers what influencers are paid to push&#x2F;shill for with zero consideration to other things like the quality of those products&#x2F;services, and because it only encourages the &quot;filter bubble&quot; problem where the obsession over targeting audiences causes people to be exposed to an artificially narrow subset of what is available.<p>The best thing for consumers would be if people with online platforms honestly and transparently promoted a highly diverse range of products (including people) that they themselves genuinely like and are interested in.