
Real People Are Turning Their Accounts into Bots on Instagram - prostoalex
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram
======
detaro
previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946900)

------
dfee
Instagram is aware of this, and I’d be surprised if they found out through
BuzzFeed News that this was happening.

So maybe this isn’t a bad thing for Instagram?

~~~
t1o5
There is one for twitter which is
[https://autotweeter.in](https://autotweeter.in) which claims to tweet and
upload fotos incessantly by reading it from an excel sheet.

------
strgrd
My impression is that SV and ycombinator types are completely unwilling, or
ambivalent to this problem, and mainly because these grey market like-bots
only make their platforms look more popular, and give content creators a pay-
to-win process towards what appears as social media success.

They gloss over points like this: "The risk of realizing that the internet is
massively manipulated is that the cognitive overhead to process even the most
basic interactions increases, suspicion increases, polarization potentially
increases."

~~~
justboxing
> or ambivalent to this problem

It's not a 'problem' for Instagram if it results in increased revenues from
the increase engagement, even if it is from falsely inflated follower numbers,
posts, comments, activity etc.

> In other words, Fuelgram creates fake engagement from real Instagram
> accounts. And it's quite effective. Fuelgram makes posts appear more popular
> than they are, tricking Instagram's algorithm into spreading them further,
> sometimes right into the service's high-profile Explore tab.

------
misterbowfinger
At first I figured Instagram would just rate-limit likes/comments via the API,
but these people are handing over their account & password to services like
Fuelgram....

Although I don't think that's a bad idea in principle - everyone has a set
amount of likes & comments they can do per day. It'd make the value of a
"like" much higher (a la Tinder).

~~~
Cthulhu_
Even with rate limits, you know there will be people that do thousands of
interactions a day on instagram - more than enough for bots to work with.

------
ishanjain28
Just in case anyone doubts this story, I have built 6 of these Instagram
engagement bots within last month that operate on telegram and are used to
monitor engagement of all the people who signed up.

------
Demcox
12,000USD..... Holy sh*t that is good money for just having a RPie running!

~~~
pletnes
I’ll sell you mine for $1000. OK?

~~~
ct0
the code is worth money, not the hardware

~~~
jstanley
I think that was the point - it's not $12k just for having a RPi running.

~~~
pletnes
Points aside, the rpi is still for sale at $1000.

~~~
Demcox
Yeah sure, just send me your full name, address, phone number, credit card
info and picture of your driving license then I'll mail the dollars to you!

------
jankotek
> _Viral Hippo posted a photo of a black square._

> _And yet within 24 hours, it amassed over 1,500 likes from a group that
> included a verified model followed by 296,000 people_

Are you sure it is fake? Modern art has long history of similar
stunts.'Viralhippo' account has good following and posts memes, black square
could easily go viral.

~~~
vuln
BuzzFeed created the Viral Hippo account and black square post.

