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With social media being one of the most used platforms of this generation, more and more businesses are turning to popular social media personalities for sponsorships and advertisements. But with social media being filled with bot accounts, the numbers for determining how much they should pay get distorted. In order to separate what accounts are bots from which are real, Dovetale, a software company founded in 2016 has developed a method to identify in large numbers what accounts are or aren't real people. They then send the information to marketers who are able to better determine how much money should be payed to social media stars for advertisements or sponsorships. This service is becoming increasingly popular as a recent investigation showed a booming industry of people selling fake followers to distort viewership numbers.
Questions:
1. Is there enough of a demand for companies like Dovetale to survive?
2. How do you think these strategies to identify bot accounts will impact those selling fake accounts? Will people continue to purchase bot services or will the industry die out all together?
3. Should the owners of the social media sites intervene? How would they prevent the creation and use of bot accounts?
3 comments:
Considering the growing trend of fake accounts, I would think that there is currently enough demand for software companies like Dovetale to survive. However, I don't think the industry selling bot accounts will be significantly impacted, as it is far easier and faster to produce bot accounts than it is to investigate and determine their fraudulence. In other words, although companies like Dovetale are able to pick out some fake accounts, it still takes them awhile to do so, so they barely make a dent in the sheer number of bot accounts out there. I do think it would be good for social media sites to intervene because bot accounts over-inflate the salary of online creators, although I'm not sure what types of preventive methods could be used.
While there may not be demand that exists among the end users, there will be very high demand within the sites like Facebook and Twitter themselves, as the issue of removing botting in these sites is of upmost importance to them. There will still probably be people selling accounts on sites like Reddit, but with the development of this new technology, which I assume uses AI of some sort, hopefully it won't be that much of an issue anymore.
I do think there is at least a decent demand for companies such as dovetale because of the popularity of social media and companies recent ideas of partnering with social media personalities to advertise for them. I dont think this strategy will cause a decrease in the purchasing of bot accounts because dovetale can only identify if there is a bot account, but they cant remove the account, and it seems they only sell to business's who are interested in sponsoring social media personalities. If reducing bot accounts is a priority to social media owners, the creators of current social media's should work with dovetale in order to identify and delete as many bot accounts as they can.
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