Buying Your Followers

It's a dark and lonely place out there. Did you know that, should you need to have more friends, numerous companies offer to sell you some?

It's not really their friends of course, but hey! Yours are not necessarily your followers either.

I am of course talking about social media followers, whether for accounts such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SoundTube, or Pinterest, you can increase your faithful friends and followers by simply buying them. Sounds a bit like slave trade to me, but of course, they are not real people, just online avatars.

Some are guaranteed to stay for years. Some will be just like robots, no interaction needed. It's a cold universe but in the virtual plane, who knows who is who and what they really are and do? The closest people to you also may have a secret life and name and peruse online incognito.

The deals are simple and easy to purchase via Paypal or other credit establishment. Here are some examples of what is out there:

- 200 Pinterest followers for $5
- 2,000 Twitter followers for $12; or 25,000 for $49, and 50,000 for $89
- 5,000 Instagram likes for $18
- 10,000 Facebook likes for $50

And so on. Killer deals, right? One might slightly dislike the idea of the concept, but it's seems legal, and irresistible. A practice highly addictive, already in use by politicians (who need numbers), celebrities (who need love), and kids (who need peers.)

Let me ask you this: How can President Obama have 70 million friends? Or Lady Gaga have 35 million? You answer that question.

One major drawback with the system is that the so-called friends of yours could be from all over the world, meaning you could end up with 25,000 friends who only speak Spanish or Arabic. That makes it hard to follow back if you don't speak their language. But maybe you won't care, you only want numbers.

You may also get a lot of porn, but each new unwanted "friend" can easily be blocked and removed as soon as they show up on the page. Unfortunately, there is no way from preventing kids to see those if they have their own buying power card.

There is a way to avoid this, by buying targeted audiences, where you decide the origin and other criteria of the followers you are willing to buy, but that will cost you more my friend (pun intended.)

Besides, I found it nice to know everybody in my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. But that's just me.