Vice’s Motherboard recently published an article outlining how easy it is to purchase fake followers, likes, and views on the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok. According to Vice, buying fake engagement on TikTok is “easy and cheap.”
In a recent article titled “All Of My TikTok Followers Are Fake,” Vice describes just how easy it is to manipulate the popular social media app TikTok by purchasing fake likes, followers, and video views to boost the engagement on users’ videos.
Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox describes a video uploaded to TikTok of Motherboard staffers winning a match of the popular video game Call of Duty: Warzone. Cox states that the video is relatively bland with no interesting editing or captivating TikTok stars to make the clip go viral, but within a matter of hours the video had 25,000 views and over 1,000 likes on the TikTok platform. The video slowly began to climb through the rankings of one of the Warzone-related hashtags that people use to share clips from the game.
This was because Cox had spent around $50 to artificially inflate the popularity of the video by purchasing fake views, likes, and followers. Cox writes in the article:
Buying followers, likes, and other engagement on TikTok highlights the grey market for social media amplification; an issue that is common across social networks writ large. The engagement we paid for didn’t make the video or account viral, and we don’t know if a TikTok video can go viral with inauthentic engagement alone; we only bought a relatively small amount of engagement., But paying for engagement on TikTok is easy and cheap. Nine days after paying for followers, the account and video are still up, seemingly undetected by Tiktok.
Cox outlines the process he went through to purchase a number of followers on his account:
To see how simple it is to buy various pieces of TikTok engagement, last week I uploaded my Warzone clip to TikTok, and then bought 250 followers from the website advertising the service. After specifying how many followers I wanted, providing my account name, and adding the item to my cart, I paid just over $12 via PayPal. The site also takes Paytr, Stripe, and other payment processors too for a cheaper price.
The results weren’t subtle. I got 250 new followers seconds after making a payment. The followers I bought were a wide mix of accounts purporting to be women, men, and many users with profile pictures of things like animals or even in one case a computer graphics card. Some have obviously generated usernames such as “user2299926539189,” others have full names like “Pauline Chavez.”
Cox’s investigation highlights just how easy it can be to manipulate the algorithms of these social media platforms and artificially inflate a user’s popularity solely through the calculated purchase of likes, followers, and views.
Read the full investigation at Motherboard here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com