Why do people pay for friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter?
Image via Wikipedia
Why on earth do some people buy friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter? I say friends, but of course I don’t really mean friends at all when money has changed hands to acquire them, I mean online identities attached to your own as friends or followers, according to the parlance of the two social networking sites.
On Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. They’re not cheap. The biggest block marketing firm USocial is selling is 100,000 people. Nobody has 100,000 friends. I don’t know anyone with 1,000 friends. Not real ones at any rate. A few hundred, sure, but how many of those are friends and how many are mere acquaintances, passing ships in the night?
Most of us can understand the human drives involved in paying for company, paying for sex, whether we object to such transactions on moral and religious grounds or not. Loneliness and lust are the most obvious factors involved in reaching for your wallet in order to get the chance to touch and caress someone else’s body. But forking up serious money just to stack up the number count on a column on a website?
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