Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  One common justification I’ve heard is, “everyone else is doing it, so I’m just leveling the playing field.” This is actually one of the ones that make more sense to me. While it’s not technically true that everyone else is gaming the system, it is true that many of the top Influencers are. Humans are social animals, and if they see all their friends playing a “game,” they are more likely to play it the same way. The sheer volume of dodgy courses, websites, Facebook groups, and other tools available to cheat makes it seem acceptable to participate. And when you join a pod and see hundreds of thousands of others are doing the same things, it makes the justifying it to yourself a lot easier.

  As we found with our @genttravel experiment, it’s actually very easy to buy your way into the golden 100K (or 1 million) follower level and start getting hired as an Influencer. Once you’re in the Influencer club, you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of other people who are also faking it, which also makes it easier to justify.

  Another justification I’ve heard is, “You gotta pay to play!” I hear it repeated in many YouTube videos, where hawkers encourage people to sign up for their “Instagram Follower Growth” courses. These people suggest that, if you have good content, you should pay some of these services to make sure people see your content.

  While we may never fully understand the reasons, we do know how these Influencers are accomplishing their diabolic undertakings. These social media black markets make it very easy to manipulate social media ecosystems for less-than-ethically-obtained profit.

  Chapter 4

  How to Slow the Zombie Apocalypse (Or: How to Detect the Fakes)

  “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

  — Richard P. Feynman

  Instagram’s public relations team often talks about taking strong steps toward addressing the deluge of fake accounts, likes, and comments.

  Way back in 2014, there was one bot purge of significance, dubbed the “Instagram Rapture.” Even the @instagram account itself lost 18 million followers. Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million. Rapper Akon even lost over 50% of his followers, as you can see in his historical chart.37

  I am not claiming any of these people bought followers. I’m sure many of them did not. For example, as I mentioned, the @instagram account itself lost 18 million followers. It’s clear to me that they would not buy followers. Bots will often follow celebrities to make the bot accounts appear more human and legitimate, and I’m sure some of these celebrities were subjected to that sort of bot activity.

  Here is the historical chart for @akon. You can see where the Instagram Rapture happened, which dropped him from about 4.3 million followers to about 2 million followers. There’s also a spike in the middle of 2015. I don’t know what that means, but I see that spike in many people’s accounts. I believe it was a statistical reporting error. Source: Socialblade.com

  Here is the historical chart for the official @instagram account. It jibes with the chart above, with the dropoff happening right before the end of 2014. This dip appears smaller than @akon, of course, but keep in mind the scale of the Y axis is in the hundreds of millions instead of singles of millions. Source: Socialblade.com

  At the time of the purge in 2014, The Guardian pointed to reports suggesting that there were more bots on the Internet than there were people on the planet.38 One can only suspect that bots have gotten smarter and more prolific since 2014.

  It’s doubtful that the purge of 2014 cleared out 100% of the bots. Yet, a simple inspection of the charts above will show that there have been no serious purges since 2014. I certainly do not see any other significant dips in these charts or many of the other historical charts I’ve looked at. What percentage of bots did the Instagram Rapture clear out? We have no idea. Even any subsequent purge, after this book is published, is not guaranteed to clear out 100% of the bots.

  In my initial conversation with representatives within Instagram in 2018, they indicated that the sort of activities I’ve documented are against their Terms and Conditions. When fraudulent users are discovered, they are removed. However, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of this. By looking at the charts, perhaps only minor manscaping has been achieved.

  So, what can you do to detect fake accounts and Influencers who are leveraging bots to appear more popular than they are? There are a variety of tools and techniques you can use to spot the scammers. I’ll walk through some of those below.

  How To Spot Fake Accounts as a User

  In just two days of hunting, I easily found more than 200 accounts that appear to be cheating the system. I could use any of them as an example, but I’ll pick one suspected fake Influencer at random, from the travel industry, and compare her account to a genuine account. I’m sure one of those two will be upset, but she should really go out and get a regular job like everyone else.

  I will emphasize something I said before about the accusation of individuals. I cannot prove anything. I am looking at the trends, the data, the comments, the anomalies, etc. I believe in the intelligence of you, awesome reader, to draw your own conclusions.

  Let’s begin with an introduction to two seemingly very similar accounts: @miss.everywhere and @theblondeabroad. Just by looking at their Instagram feeds, which one do you think is the one who is likely buying followers and engagement? It’s really hard to tell, right? Both have about half a million followers. Both are attractive blonde travelers. Both have excellent photos taken in exotic locations. Both seem to have decent engagement on their posts.

  However, I believe one of them has created an online business in a misleading way by purchasing followers, likes, and comments to pass as an Influencer.

  Spot the difference? Hard, isn’t it!

  I really believe any average person, including someone who works in marketing, would think both these Influencers appear legitimate. You can see lots of followers, loads of likes, and heaps of comments, which are supposedly the hallmarks of legitimacy.

  So, as a user, how would you go about deciding if these Influencers are legitimate?

  Eyeball It

  Many people think they can go look at an account and get a “sense” of how real they are as if they are using some kind of a Ouija board. This is sort of like the “sniff” test, and, honestly, it’s not a terrible method.

  However, doing a deep analysis of an account can take several hours, if not longer. Doing a full review of an account requires going down a series of rabbit holes, as the only accurate way to see if something passes the sniff test is to look in detail at who’s making all the comments and likes and examine a significant sampling of each to see if they seem real or if they are bots. Figuring out which accounts are real people and which are bots, is becoming harder and harder, as even fake accounts will have a ton of content, great photos, Instagram stories, comments of their own, and more. In real life, it’s very hard to impersonate a human with a personality. It’s remarkably easy online and getting easier every day.

  If you are going to analyze an account, it’s good to have a few different people looking at the account, checking out suspicious comments, then drilling down and finding out if these comments are made by real people. It’s challenging work that requires a lot of concentration. You may see a comment that has a pile of inscrutable emojis. You click on that person and try to figure out if it’s plausible they speak emoji as a second language.

  What makes it even more difficult for actual humans to find out if accounts are legitimate is that real people can make fake comments and follow accounts that they may not intend to. As we touched on in chapter 3, someone may have given their login details to a third party, and with or without their knowledge, that third party now uses bots to comment on their behalf. So the accounts may be real, but the comments and followers may still be fake.

  What do you see when you eyeball @miss.everywhere? I’ve eyeballed many accounts now, so I’ve got
ten a certain knack for it. When I eyeball her, I see a few things:

  She has a bunch of showy posts.

  These posts have a very high number of brand mentions.

  The account has less than 1,000,000 followers.

  But, her posts have hundreds of comments and thousands of likes, which seems disproportionate to the number of followers she has.

  That is enough to make me suspicious. So, let’s do a bit more of a deep dive.

  Check Their Background: Look at Their Follower Counts over Time

  In every other element of society, we have background check mechanisms and trusted independent auditors to verify that people are who they say they are. There are thousands of companies that do criminal background checks during the hiring process. There are thousands of companies that do credit checks on you before you buy a car or house. There are thousands of companies that do drug testing. In traditional media, there are companies that are widely trusted to provide verified circulation audits.

  But social media is still largely unregulated. Doing a quick search, I couldn’t find any reliable way to verify statistics on these accounts and I can’t be the only one taking a stab in the dark. As we found with @genttravel, the fake Instagram Influencer we manufactured as a test, even Influencer agencies who claim to vet Influencers can’t be doing any kind of real digging—most of them didn’t notice or care that our 30-day-old account was obviously a fake.

  However, after rather extensive research, I did uncover a few websites that could be useful for follower and engagement background checks. Some of them do an analysis of a list of Instagrammers you provide and come back with some level of “guess” as to how many are real. I don’t have confidence in any of these sites, however, because I know they don’t have access to enough of Instagram’s data to be completely sure—they’re still guessing, just like we are.

  Until Instagram opens up access to user data in a more meaningful way, the most surefire method to detect a fraudulent Influencer is based on analyzing historical growth patterns. The best tool to use is called Socialblade.com, which we’ve referenced in other places in this book. (I hope the website doesn’t crash now that I mentioned it.)

  When looking up an Instagram user, it is good to click on “Historical Data” at the top, which shows older data. Currently, the site is a little strange in that it picks a random month from last year, but the chart at the bottom usually contains more historical data. Also, keep in mind that SocialBlade.come does not track 100% of users. Last, the features on the site are always in flux, so it’s good to poke around and get to know the tool on your own.

  So, let’s start there and compare the historical growth of @miss.everywhere and @theblondeabroad.

  A comparative historical growth chart of followers for the two accounts we’re comparing. If you’re seeing this in black & white, @miss.everywhere is the jagged line. A smooth curve plots @theblondeabroad’s growth. By the way, of all the screenshots in the book, this is my favorite. Source: Socialblade.com Screenshot was taken on March 4, 2018.

  Those of you skilled in data analysis can already see that these curves look very different. The growth pattern for @theblondeabroad, in blue, is very smooth. The vast majority of Instagrammers will have a smooth growth curve like this. The growth curve of my own accounts looks similar to this, as do those of a variety of other trusted friends I know who also always play by the rules.

  Compare this smooth growth to the staccato rhythm of @miss.everywhere’s growth line. The spikes you see are very similar to @genttravel’s growth chart on the days we bought thousands of followers. You’ll also notice a slight decrease after each of these spikes. That is abnormal for organic growth curves (you never see @theblondeabroad’s follower count dip like this), but very normal to see for accounts that have purchased a lot of their followers.

  If you look closely at the smoother blue line, you may have noticed two “mini-jumps,” or ramps, in @theblondeabroad’s curve. I asked Kiersten Rich about this. (That’s her name; it’s not really “theblondeabroad,” as that would be a very silly name.) I met her years ago during my annual photowalk at Burning Man, so I know she’s the real deal and doesn’t buy followers or engagement. She works her tail off to consistently create great images with well-crafted writing and works hard to deliver quality to her clients as a genuine Influencer. She was very open to answering all of my questions.

  Regarding those jumps in followers, Kiersten explained that she received three mentions on March 4th and 5th from @gopro, an extremely popular account with about 15 million followers. Kiersten sent me the three corresponding Instagram posts. She said each mention produced around 2,700 new followers for her. Remember this number because many fakers will suggest that they get much bigger spikes because they are mentioned by another Instagram account. There are not many accounts bigger than @gopro, so most of those claims are spurious at best. Each @gopro post that featured Kiersten received 200,000 to 300,000 likes.

  Here is an example of one of @theblondeabroad’s takeovers of the @gopro account (15 million followers). Each mention gave her an extra 2,700 followers.

  People often assume that a mention from a huge account like @gopro automatically brings a windfall of followers. There are some rare exceptions, of course, but typically the conversion is quite low. Another friend, wedding photographer @jimpollardgoesclick, got a mention from a significant account when he took wedding photos of the actress @annecurtissmith, who has 8.6 million followers. She mentioned him three times and those mentions gave him a boost of about 1,700, 1,200, and 1,650 followers, respectively.

  To close out this section, below is a chart from our fake account, @genttravel, for comparison. The jumps here are a little smoother, but it’s still pretty clear that most of our followers were garnered inorganically.

  You can see from the 10th of March to the 24th of March, the account grew impossibly fast from about 18,000 followers to over 40,000 followers. This is, of course, because we bought followers from a variety of services.

  Look at Where Their Followers Are Coming From

  I also used a website called HypeAuditor to do some more investigating. I believe this tool’s statistical analysis to be very accurate because I first ran their multi-page report on my own account and it looked pretty good. I compared it to the official numbers from the “Insights” area of the Instagram app, and it was spot on.

  So, I ran the same report on @miss.everywhere. I’ve placed one of the most interesting sections on the following page. Now, keep in mind that @miss.everywhere herself is German and all her posts on Instagram are in English or German.

  A statistical breakdown of the geography of followers of @miss.everywhere. Source: HypeAuditor

  Isn’t it so interesting then how the vast majority (61%) of her audience speak Spanish, while only 25% speak English? Heck, that sure is odd. And far more of her followers come from non-English, non-German speaking countries (Mexico, Colombia, and Chile) than both her followers from the US and Germany combined.

  Comparing her demographics to those of @theblondeabroad shows a stark contrast.

  A statistical breakdown of the followers of @theblondeabroad. Source: HypeAuditor

  Here, you can see @theblondeabroad has demographic numbers that make a lot more sense given what we know about her. In contrast to @miss.everywhere, 81% of @theblondeabroad’s followers live in countries that speak English, and her top five countries are precisely what we would expect. Cape Town is also a top city, which looks like an anomaly, but it makes sense because that’s where she lives.

  Follower demographics can be quite different depending on the Influencer’s niche. In many markets, the total number of followers is less important than the demographics of the followers. For example, I don’t have as many followers as, say, a 21-year-old Influencer who does beauty tutorials might have. My audience is mostly older men and women who like to travel, use expensive photography gear, enjoy reading, have disposable income, and
share a love of gadgets. This sort of follower is appealing to certain types of brands—brands who wouldn’t be interested in working with the more popular, young, makeup artist.

  So, as you can see from these charts, @miss.everywhere has quite anomalous numbers. I made a note to talk to her about this in an upcoming interview that I get to later in the chapter. I know, this is like a thriller, right? Resist the temptation to skip ahead while I throw more evidentiary fuel on the fire.

  By the way, although the HypeAuditor website where I got these reports was able to provide very accurate demographic information, you have to take some of their other conclusions with a couple of handfuls of salt. For instance, HypeAuditor also claims to be able to tell us how many followers are fake. I ran their report on several accounts, from those with very real followers to those with lots of fake followers. They weren’t very good at guessing the number of fake followers an account has. Since Instagram hasn’t allowed any website access to all their data yet, HypeAuditor has to extrapolate based on a very small amount of data. In my opinion, their guesses on the accounts I checked were way off.

  Now, let’s get deeper into unusual number patterns in follower growth.

  Look for Big Decreases in Followers after Purchase Days

  Earlier, I mentioned that when someone buys followers, a telltale sign that they’ve done this is that their follower count will jump, then drop noticeably over the next week. You see this in @miss.everywhere’s growth line.