
People Are Turning Their Instagram Accounts into Bots - marban
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram?ref=hvper.com
======
leejo
This is why algorithmic based curation/display of content is a bad thing, it
can be gamed. Show me the accounts I follow in chronological order and the
only way it can be gamed is if those accounts continually post over and over
again to push their content to be the most recent - and that's easy to fix:
limit the number of posts to one per hour.

As a photographer Instagram is pretty much over as a platform for me, there is
very little content on there now I would call "photographic" other than a few
accounts I follow, but those are shown out of order and with ads mixed in-
between. The explore page has become a mass of memes, "viral" videos, half
naked women, spam, reposts from reddit, reposts of other reposts, and so on. I
can see the same content multiple times on the explore page, reposted over and
over. I recently unfollowed most of the accounts to put an end to the "such
and such liked this so we will show it to you" as well.

And of course, as per the article, you have a massive amount of accounts that
are liking and following to try to get followers in return. Some of these are
more obvious than others. If you use Tinder you'll have seen an increasing
trend of matches wanting you to follow them on Instagram, because they want to
up their follower count.

All that said, I'm guilty of this too. I have a personal Instagram account
that I do very little with[1], but also an account for the gallery I volunteer
at[2] to try to spread the word to people in the area - I have a script that
will like + follow anyone that posts to Instagram with tags and/or a location
in the village. This script has been running once a day for about 6 months,
and I believe it _has_ brought some people into the gallery.

I also run an events page on Instagram[3] with a script that will like +
follow any content tagged with various programming related keywords. Looking
at some of the accounts it's followed (or have followed us back) it's bizarre
- you can see accounts in which the content is just someone posting images of
their laptop once a day and they have follower counts in the tens of
thousands.

Anyway, it feels as if Instagram is at a tipping point. It's no longer a
platform for photography but now a platform for driving traffic to other
businesses. I'd give it another year or two before it collapses in on itself
or they do a root and branch purge of all the spam, which probably won't
happen as long as it is driving revenue to Instagram/Facebook itself.

[1] [https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/](https://www.instagram.com/leejebay/)
[2]
[https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/](https://www.instagram.com/galeriealpine/)
[3]
[https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/](https://www.instagram.com/perl_events/)

~~~
nasredin
I wonder if future archeologists will think "like" and "follow" and
"subscribe" are some kind of (useless) currency.

21st century Tulip Mania.

~~~
verelo
Why wait? I already feel they're useless...

~~~
batuhanw
But not currency, is it? Maybe social currency.

------
TACIXAT
I realize that activity and content are what media sites need, but the publish
/ subscribe model that celebrity accounts reinforce is the antithesis of
anything social. I shutdown my Twitter because there is near zero interaction
on there. In the same sense, Facebook is very much a media sharing platform,
rather than a social platform to connect with people.

I would like to see a paid social network with zero tolerance for programmatic
interaction. Maybe tied to a (non voip) phone to make the cost of shill
accounts high. I do feel there is a chance to unseat the major sites right
now, it just requires a site that provides meaningful interaction instead of
ads and corporate interest.

~~~
opencl
Where do you get this idea that Twitter has near zero interaction? There is
tons of interaction on Twitter. Obviously if you follow a bunch of celebrity
accounts you will personally not see a lot of interaction. I mostly follow
friends and/or people who post about hobbies I enjoy and interact with them
frequently.

~~~
TACIXAT
I specifically did not follow celebs. My tweets would generally get 1 or 2
likes, maybe about 60 impressions, and the occasional reply from one of a few
friends. I would still end up seeing celeb accounts through the your friend
follows and your friend liked feature.

~~~
opencl
It's definitely a matter of who you're following/who follows you, that's true
of any site.

IG/FB very much actively encourages (with their newsfeed algorithms, and to an
extent also the UI) 'influencer'-type accounts over individual communication.
Twitter imo is significantly less bad about this.

------
iamben
Devil's advocate after 10 seconds of thought. Is this _really_ a bad thing for
the users? I mean, you don't have to follow accounts you don't enjoy
following. Just black and yellow squares? Don't follow it. If you enjoy the
content, does it matter if the account is run by bots? Even on the explore
page, Instagram seems to do fairly well with showing you pictures of things
you like - I see a ton of cats, burgers and watches. I don't really care if
the accounts are run by bots... They're just pretty pictures. As for my feed,
it's my friends or people I've chosen to follow. Whether they're posting
themselves or via a cron job on a raspberry pi, I don't really care. If I did,
I'd unfollow.

~~~
llccbb
The problem is also around people artificially liking and commenting on your
own posts (if they are public). I had encountered this last year when I was
running a photography project and I would have to deal with fake accounts
posting on every image. Each would post one of the following messages: 'Nice!
Check out my page!', 'Wow! Cool pic. Want to increase your followers, click
the link in my profile.", "Very nice. Follow back".

I don't want that spam in my image comments (considering there would only be 1
or 2 comments from real people and 10+ of these). I had to go through and
manually delete them, block the users (achieving nothing because there are so
many of these spammers).

This is a serious UX problem that has turned me away from Instagram (which was
the "best social media" platform before they destroyed the chronologic
timeline). I don't care if people are using an API to post legitimate content
(I would have loved the ability to post content to multiple sites at once
(twitter, IG, ...)). I care when the API enables annoying spammers.

~~~
dnzm
This is not so much a ux problem as an "marketeers gonna marketeer" problem.
It happened before with blog comments, it happens now with "social" media,
it'll happen with whatever comes next. If it's remotely exploitable for
personal gain, there's going to be people exploiting it.

------
temp-dude-87844
Algorithm gaming and non-organic engagement go hand in hand. A cheeky reading
is that juicing sites like Fuelgram are providing a valuable service for their
customers. If this is problematic, consider what will happen when Instagram
bans them: the demand won't go away, instead the same people will be paying
Instagram more, to place their ads wider. For the user, the end result is
largely the same.

This is all a numbers game: there's a finite amount of attention-slots in
people's minds that everyone wants their content to fit in. Any engine that
surfaces unsolicited content will have this issue, from paid ads to
algorithmic recommendations.

------
pfarnsworth
My wife has about 20,000 followers on Instagram, most of them fake because she
was tricked into buying them through "free" Instagram filters apps.

It's so interesting watching the activity generated every time she makes a
post, the number of push notifications that come through within minutes is
incredible. As well, the comments are often absurd on her posts.

It's so obvious to a non-Instagram user (ie. me) that there is a tremendous
number of bots going around, the fact that Facebook doesn't do something to
eradicate the bots indicates to me that they're afraid to reveal the true
numbers to their investors and advertisers, otherwise it would drastically
affect their income.

------
lucb1e
> 22-year-old kids

Kids are getting older every year it seems.

------
ryandrake
Man, this article makes me feel old and out of touch. I don't understand so
many things about it. Why would someone pay to have a bot click "like" on
them, and why would someone invest $X000 in a list of usernames and passwords
rather than create their own free accounts? Why are "followers" worth money?
Can someone ELI5 me the chain of money that makes any of this activity make
any sense at all?

~~~
eaenki
One would pay $100k for an account with the username "fitness" because it's
artificially scarce, like a domain name. There's plenty of people searching
for "fitness" on IG.

A list of usernames and passwords it's useful if you use a program to manage
them - automatically. Spam detection is super good nowadays, so it's super
hard to create many accounts and keep them alive. Actually, keeping them alive
it's the harder segment of it.

Fake followers = fake accounts. They're worthless. But some people don't care
and just like to inflate their followers number because people think its cool
to have many followers. Aslong as they can't tell they're fake tho.

Real followers = real persons following you because they like you. They're
valuable. Why? Like any other advertising model where you're the publisher,
you get paid per impression/post/sale/click/whatever. E.g you can share a
photo where you're holding a certain brand of whisky and you get paid by said
brand (to get brand to pay you, they either contact you directly or you
partner with some agency) or you can promote your own company as well
obviously. . You can also share a link in the bio.

~~~
paulcole
> Fake followers = fake accounts. They're worthless.

Pardon my ignorance but I thought the more followers and engagement you have
on Instagram the more you can charge for a sponsored post or product
placement?

~~~
awat
Thats my understanding as well and fake followers can also be exchanged for a
perceived social importance not just monetary value.

Example: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/26/how-
many-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/26/how-many-twitter-
followers-do-they-really-have)

------
hokus
At times I joke on irc that I could write a bot that makes more interesting
conversation than the people there.

------
Cofike
Is that guy running the bot farm not afraid of legal action from Instagram?
I'm not well versed but it seems like something they could go after him for. I
wouldn't be spouting off about it to buzzfeed, that's for sure.

~~~
UncleEntity
From what I can tell they "deprecated immediately" (on April 4, 2018) a whole
bunch of API endpoints that (probably) make this sort of thing impossible.

...which is unfortunate since I went and signed up on Instagram so I could
play with their API to see how hard it would be to detect bots with a little
python-fu.

It now looks like you have to have a facebook business account to be able to
"game" instagram -- maybe?

------
ggm
I don't want to _like_ viral hippo, but I certainly do like the smarts behind
it.

It reminded me of a "mad cow disease" word document we shared around the place
back in the 90s, which had a picture of a cow with VB rolling eyes..

------
jobigoud
This reminds me a lot of doping in sports. With seemingly normal people
justifying it with "everyone is doing it so you have to do it to level the
field" with a complete disregard for the ethical side of it.

~~~
neolithic
The problem is that Instagram incentivizes this sort of behaviour by greatly-
diminishing the reach of those companies/users that have legitimately built
their followers. I mean we see 10% reach of our followers (if we're lucky)
with any of our posts. That means 90% of our real followers don't get to see
our posts that they have asked to see (by following our account).

------
tinus_hn
This should be quite easy to detect, given that it is a closed group of
accounts liking each other.

The main problem is what to do then. Instagram may not want to ban influential
bloggers.

------
codetrotter
I have an Instagram account and I have noticed that most of the likes I get
are from the accounts of real people but that most of the likes I get are
obviously automated and insincere.

Personally I find it infuriating that people do this.

Abusing the "like" mechanism is neither clever nor acceptable. It is a
nuisance and it devalues the platform a lot.

Some of the photos and videos I post are mainly for myself and a few of my
friends.

Some of the other videos I post because I want people from the whole world to
see them.

The ones that are targeted at my friends I post with a short description and
only one or two hashtags at most.

The ones that I want people from the whole world to see I add a handful of
relevant hashtags to, so that people browsing those tags have a chance to see
those things.

The pattern I have seen is that random accounts will randomly like previous
posts of mine. Sometimes they like the sort of post that is discoverable via a
popular hashtag but just as often I get likes on the images that you only find
by coming to my profile -- the sort of images that is obviously of very little
actual interest to anyone but myself and a few of my friends. In particular, I
should say; most often these are accounts whose description state the
profession of the person, and whose photos and videos tend to either revolve
around that thing as well, or they post memes. Typically the profession of the
person falls into one of three categories;

1\. Musician. I post some music stuff and I follow some musicians. Almost
certainly the people organizing the like-spamming have set it up so that if
you are a musician and you ask them to like-spam for you, they have a list of
other musicians with lots of followers and they use the lists of the followers
of those people to find people interested in music that they can like-spam.

2\. Personal Trainer.

3\. Marketing person.

I report fake accounts when I see them but when it comes to the accounts of
real people you only know that the majority of them are spamming but you can't
know whether a single individual is like-spamming or actually leaving sincere
likes.

Hence whenever I get likes from people that I don't know, I must assume that
they are just spam-likes but at the same time I have no recourse.

The fact that I must assume they are all spam-likes is what devalues the likes
for me.

The spam-likers have literally driven the value of a like to zero. When
someone likes something I posted it _should_ have been positive for me, but
unless I know the person it's not because I know that there is an overwhelming
probability that it's just another insincere fake like.

I hope that anyone and everyone partaking in the fake liking gets their
account banned eventually. But if that even ever happened, which it won't,
that would be so far into the future that in all likelihood I've already left
Instagram for some other platform because I don't know how much longer I am
going to bother maintaining a presence on Instagram.

Oh and another equally, or perhaps even more annoying thing that is being done
is accounts that follow you and then some hours or days later they unfollow
you. Because they never intended to follow you in the first place; they
intentionally do this so that you will follow them back, hoping you will
either not notice that they unfollow you or that you'll still keep following
them even if you do notice. Rude!

As for what Instagram could do about this, it's _not_ trivial but I think they
could be doing _more_ about it than they are currently. At the very least, the
latter pattern of those I mentioned (frequently following and then unfollowing
heaps of people) should be quite obvious to the people at Instagram if they
cared.

~~~
jobigoud
I feel the same. I just had a bot liking my 5 most recent posts in a row
although they are very different from each other.

The follow-unfollow pattern is done by bots controlling accounts as well I
think.

Making the likes anonymous, as on reddit or HN, would be a big step forward.

