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.

Read More: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/friends-and-influence-for-sale-online/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Social media manipulation is a thriving business.