Image credit – Conscious Minds
The concept of purchasing followers for your social media profile to come across more popular than you really are isn’t new, and now a vending machine has popped up in popular tourists locations in Los Angeles, California where for $10, you can actually purchase yourself 1,000 fake followers.
However this isn’t what it seems and is actually a marketing stunt designed around the launch of a documentary called Social Animals. The documentary follows three teens who aspire to be Instagram stars and together with the vending machine, is meant to highlight how some of us get too caught up in the world of Instagram.
For the most part the items sold in the vending machine are jokes, such as a candy box filled with “likes & likes”, or “witty captions”, or “DM sliders”, or a hashtag 8 ball that helps users decide if they should post that caption or not. So far two of these vending machines exist and are available for several hours a day at locations such as Venice Beach and the downtown Walt Disney Concert Area.
There is debate on whether or not buying followers is considered “illegal”. This is because it can be hard to pinpoint whether or not a person has purchased followers, especially if they do it slowly and over time which can come across as looking like organic growth. Platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have purged their platforms of various bots over the years, where at one point in time there was a moment in Instagram’s history known as the purge where many high profile users suddenly lost thousands of followers overnight.
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