Real People Are Turning Their Accounts into Bots on Instagram

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram

by prostoalex • 8 years ago

56 19 8 years ago

buzzfeed.com

Demcox3• 8 years ago

12,000USD..... Holy sh*t that is good money for just having a RPie running!

pletnes2• 8 years ago

I’ll sell you mine for $1000. OK?

ct0• 8 years ago

the code is worth money, not the hardware

detaro• 8 years ago

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16946900

misterbowfinger• 8 years ago

At first I figured Instagram would just rate-limit likes/comments via the API, but these people are handing over their account & password to services like Fuelgram....

Although I don't think that's a bad idea in principle - everyone has a set amount of likes & comments they can do per day. It'd make the value of a "like" much higher (a la Tinder).

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

Even with rate limits, you know there will be people that do thousands of interactions a day on instagram - more than enough for bots to work with.

jankotek• 8 years ago

Viral Hippo posted a photo of a black square.
And yet within 24 hours, it amassed over 1,500 likes from a group that included a verified model followed by 296,000 people

Are you sure it is fake? Modern art has long history of similar stunts.'Viralhippo' account has good following and posts memes, black square could easily go viral.

vuln• 8 years ago

BuzzFeed created the Viral Hippo account and black square post.

RandomInteger4• 8 years ago

You realize that verified accounts don't get all their followers legitimately, right?

All those folks you constantly see following you? Yeah, they're not doing that because they think you're swell; they're automated follows in the hopes you follow back,and then they unfollow soon after or some time later to lower their following count.

dfee• 8 years ago

Instagram is aware of this, and I’d be surprised if they found out through BuzzFeed News that this was happening.

So maybe this isn’t a bad thing for Instagram?

t1o5• 8 years ago

There is one for twitter which is https://autotweeter.in which claims to tweet and upload fotos incessantly by reading it from an excel sheet.

Cthulhu_2• 8 years ago

It's the same problem Twitter has, and like them, they could argue that any activity is good activity.

strgrd• 8 years ago

My impression is that SV and ycombinator types are completely unwilling, or ambivalent to this problem, and mainly because these grey market like-bots only make their platforms look more popular, and give content creators a pay-to-win process towards what appears as social media success.

They gloss over points like this: "The risk of realizing that the internet is massively manipulated is that the cognitive overhead to process even the most basic interactions increases, suspicion increases, polarization potentially increases."

justboxing• 8 years ago

or ambivalent to this problem

It's not a 'problem' for Instagram if it results in increased revenues from the increase engagement, even if it is from falsely inflated follower numbers, posts, comments, activity etc.

In other words, Fuelgram creates fake engagement from real Instagram accounts. And it's quite effective. Fuelgram makes posts appear more popular than they are, tricking Instagram's algorithm into spreading them further, sometimes right into the service's high-profile Explore tab.

ishanjain28• 8 years ago

Just in case anyone doubts this story, I have built 6 of these Instagram engagement bots within last month that operate on telegram and are used to monitor engagement of all the people who signed up.

Real People Are Turning Their Accounts into Bots on Instagram

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