Internet “Troll” operations are a fact of Online life now. EVERYBODY has them, firms in DC make tons of money from it pushing Democrats. Some aren’t even human.
Friends, and Influence, for Sale Online
Whoever said, “Money can’t buy you friends,” clearly hasn’t been on the Internet recently.
This past week, I bought 4,000 new followers on Twitter for the price of a cup of coffee. I picked up 4,000 friends on Facebook for the same $5 and, for a few dollars more, had half of them like a photo I shared on the site.
If I had been willing to shell out $3,700, I could have made one million — yes, a million — new friends on Instagram. For an extra $40, 10,000 of them would have liked one of my sunset photos.
Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. Page views. You name it; they’re for sale on websites like Swenzy, Fiverr and countless others.
Many of my new friends live outside the United States, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia — and they are not exactly human. They are bots, or lines of code. But they were built to behave like people on social media sites
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/friends-and-influence-for-sale-online/?_r=0
The social media “business model” a scam? Cue Captain Renault.