[HN Gopher] Influencer cartels manipulate social media
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Influencer cartels manipulate social media
Author : zolbrek
Score : 88 points
Date : 2024-06-04 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cepr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cepr.org)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| this is like a decade late to notice this technique, but, yes,
| that market has matured a bit more since then, but mostly in the
| size of the budgets
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Was there research a decade ago describing how these cartels
| work?
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Observations can be made without research.
| jl6 wrote:
| Indeed, early observations and unproven hypotheses are part
| of how we decide whether something is worth researching in
| the first place.
| bcheung wrote:
| A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with
| high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers
| to follow you.
|
| The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be
| interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are
| often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's
| content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a
| "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to
| qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the
| promotion.
|
| Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of
| new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are
| the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content
| is no longer any good.
|
| It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their
| analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking
| for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive,
| unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things
| like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high
| dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend
| your content to an audience that would be interested.
|
| It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and
| see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is
| faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage
| of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially
| propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your
| engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.
|
| While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer
| using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use
| you again if they have not seen tangible results.
|
| Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal
| customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do
| as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that)
| demographic.
|
| Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what
| ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your
| business / brand.
| bcheung wrote:
| Also, I really wish social media platforms provided better
| tools and didn't have policies that penalized you for deleting
| followers that are bots or junk followers.
|
| As a Las Vegas photographer that works primarily with models, I
| often have random profiles blasting out my work. These profiles
| mostly find sexy content and blast it out in hopes of growing
| their own profiles. This mostly resulted in my followers being
| 95% men from outside the US. This does absolutely nothing for
| increasing my engagement with my actual target audience (female
| models or would be models in the Las Vegas metro area wanting
| to book photoshoots).
|
| Unfortunately Instagram penalizes you and has actually removed
| the search functionality from my follower list because I was
| using it to delete bots and junk followers. They won't say this
| officially but their support ignores my requests for why this
| functionality no longer works.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Bot accounts prop up their KPIs _and_ they directly provide
| revenue. They have clear incentives to allow such bots and
| junk accounts to thrive on their platform.
| bcheung wrote:
| This makes perfect sense. If people were getting more
| organic business conversions they wouldn't pay for
| advertising as much.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Basically, swindlers swindling swindlers. Advertising industry is
| not some paragon of ethics; it shouldn't be surprised that people
| who deceive others for a living will use the same techniques
| within industry as they use on regular people.
| alexhackhack wrote:
| manipulate and influence are similar. So why are people offended?
|
| Influencers get paid for influencing/manipulating people. You now
| got the concept. If that upsets you, you are kind of slow.
| quantified wrote:
| I wonder if you are downvoted for the last two snarky sentences
| or the entire comment.
|
| The business model is similar to payola. The companies who are
| marketing via influencers would probably collude to drive up
| prices to the degree they could, that is why there are so many
| laws around that area of commerce.
|
| As far as influencers go, it's sort of a weird space. Imagine
| the popular kids in high school selling Mary Kay or Amway out
| of their lockers.
| nequo wrote:
| Figure 1 in this post, showing algorithmically enforced collusion
| in the cartel, is shocking to me as someone who hasn't spent any
| time on Instagram.
|
| The authors of the blog post describe their analysis in detail in
| the "companion paper" on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10231
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I sometimes see certain memes related to some corporate content
| pick up a ton of traction online and can't help but wonder if
| they're organic or manufactured. Spreading subtle ads through
| memes is probably still an under-explored area of marketing and
| it bypasses modern ad-blocking techniques. The way I learned of
| Invincible was through a couple memes, which eventually lead me
| to research and watch the series.
|
| To give a concrete example of another trend: a few years back
| there was this group trend on TikTok of going to the theater
| dressed up in a suit to watch some animated movie. You would only
| need to pay a couple of large accounts to engage in this trend,
| and then others will follow along because they want to fit in.
|
| Another dimension through which content marketing will probably
| expand in the future is by creating media that encourages people
| to take sides and engage in discussions, like Giant Monkey vs
| Giant Reptile, who wins? This trend is very popular within the
| political landscape, but it could probably be twisted for
| fictional IPs as well.
| piyuv wrote:
| Invincible is really cool though
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Not sure whether this comment is organic or manufactured.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It's completely organic, such as mine, where I also express
| that Invincible is really cool.
| gpspake wrote:
| I feel bad because I mention it here all the time but "Trust me
| I'm Lying" is a great book about modern guerilla marketing that
| gives some concrete examples of the sort of things I'm always
| skeptical of in "organic" online content. If I were in some
| corporate or state think tank I'd be spending all day trying to
| figure out how to get some post about "my wife's shirt" on the
| front page of Reddit with my product or propaganda in the
| background.
| localfirst wrote:
| ex) r/video, Youtube Shorts peddling dropship temu crap
| standardUser wrote:
| I don't love the increasing difficulty in telling if something
| is genuine human expression or a marketing technique designed
| to look like genuine expression. But as dystopian as that
| murkiness can seem, I still prefer it to peak 90's pre-internet
| advertising when record-breaking ad spending was primarily used
| to scream relentless in our faces until we bought stuff or
| developed a mental illness. Media in that era was far more
| monolithic and almost entirely ad-driven, and it really felt
| like the advertisers (and their favorite brands and
| multinationals) had won all the battles and the war. All that
| was left was to watch the latest Visa-sponsored TV event,
| brought you you by Honda, with special considerations from
| MetLife, all before a word from our sponsors over at Nestle.
| Even the punk festival was run by a shoe company in the 90s.
|
| Anyway, now I sometimes get ads for stuff that isn't shilled by
| a multi-billion-dollar multinational and I barely every have to
| watch an actual advertisement, so my vote goes to new hell over
| old hell, no question.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've noticed that in my hobby (guitar), all the influencers will
| release the same equipment reviews at the exact same time. They
| often refer to each other, and do co-labs. Lots of "my buddy"
| referrals, so to speak...
|
| As for the first point, that's just how marketing works these
| days. All the big influencers will get the equipment weeks
| before, test it out, and make reviews with the clause that they
| can't say anything about it until the agreed time. It of course
| feels highly coordinated, and those new releases absolutely
| dominate the social media, when the release/drop happens.
|
| Then all the smaller influencers will feed off that, and drop
| their own reviews the next days / weeks, or whenever they get the
| equipment.
|
| At one point, one starts to think - is it all authentic, or just
| made-up stuff to increase views, affiliate sales, etc.
|
| (This, of course, pales in comparison to the teen/beauty/etc.
| influencers, that will band together in a shared house, create PR
| friendships purely to pump up numbers, etc.)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > At one point, one starts to think - is it all authentic, or
| just made-up stuff to increase views, affiliate sales, etc.
|
| I've always gone the opposite. At what point was any of this
| authentic?
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Shipping pre-production test devices is a long-established
| practise that predates the influencer era by decades.
|
| Critics view movies before their release. Tech products are
| shipped to tech publications beforehand. Journalists have
| access to many press releases before they're published and on
| and on.
|
| The benefits for those involved are clear: Sources get a
| coordinated press storm. Sources can restrict access to
| flattering publications. The publications can "instantly"
| release an in-depth review and beat their competition.
|
| It's "only" all consumers who lose out. A free market might
| provide independent reviewers with a chance to beat the
| selected few on quality.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > It of course feels highly coordinated...
|
| It's like mainstream media. If you follow them across several
| countries you see the exact same pattern: they work on
| something together but put an embargo on the release. Then when
| they decide it's time to push the narrative, suddenly all
| mainstream newspaper write about, say, how masks do not work vs
| Covid, then one month later they all write at the same time how
| masks work against Covid, lately it's been a coordinated attack
| on Dubai (not that there aren't shady things there).
|
| It's not about whether they're right or not: it's the complete
| and total narrative control and coordination that is hard to
| stomach.
|
| You know you're being played.
| tamimio wrote:
| This has existed since the whole 'influencer' phenomenon began,
| particularly on social media. I recall reading an article in 2014
| about how Samsung allegedly spread slander against HTC. It's the
| reason why I don't rely on YouTube for reviews, tutorials, or
| anything beyond pure entertainment or documentaries. It seems
| that everyone is compensated in one way or another. In fact,
| monetization is the reason why social media has devolved into
| this state.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand
| social media engagement to the target audience > Back-of-the-
| envelope calculations (based on regression analysis) show that if
| advertisers pay for cartel engagement as if it were natural
| engagement, they receive only 3-18% of the value with general
| cartels, and 60-85% with topic cartels.
|
| First, users don't benefit from cartel engagement at all. The
| authors have forgotten to factor in opportunity costs of 100%. A
| "85% good" engagement that pushes a 100% engagement from my feed
| costs me 15%. This is plainly obvious by, well, the need to form
| a cartel in the first place.
|
| Second, the authors define both good engagement and topic cartels
| by comment similarity. You can't get any other result other than
| that topic cartels beat general cartels.
|
| Third, the column uses stuffy language. Write clearly and you
| spot mistakes such as one and two more easily.
|
| Fourth, as a regular app user I regard everything influencer-
| shilled as negative welfare - but that's just my opinion.
| autoexec wrote:
| > If a cartel generates engagement from influencers with other
| interests (meat lovers), this hurts consumers and advertisers. It
| hurts consumers because the platform will show them irrelevant
| content, and advertisers are hurt because their ads are shown to
| the wrong audience.
|
| Even when the content is relevant it still hurts consumers
| because ads are manipulation, and supports a system of invasive
| spying that gets used for things far outside of the scope of
| advertising, and because it only shows consumers what influencers
| are paid to push/shill for with zero consideration to other
| things like the quality of those products/services, and because
| it only encourages the "filter bubble" problem where the
| obsession over targeting audiences causes people to be exposed to
| an artificially narrow subset of what is available.
|
| The best thing for consumers would be if people with online
| platforms honestly and transparently promoted a highly diverse
| range of products (including people) that they themselves
| genuinely like and are interested in.
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