Social media is a double-edged sword. Platforms such as Instagram and Twitter give people to express their opinions on various topics like politics or current events. Facebook helps families who are many miles apart to connect.
On the other hand, younger generations use social media to inaccurately portray their lives to the world. In all fairness, almost anyone who has social media does this to a certain extent, but young adults and even children are equating their social media presence with their self-worth.
How many followers someone has on their account equates to that person's popularity. It has been ingrained into our minds that more followers means more people like you or it makes you better than others. This created apps and websites where a user can buy followers and likes. For approximately ten dollars a person can gain 500+ followers instantly. It seems too good to be true and that's because it is.
Many of these accounts are bots that somehow finesse the platform and follow the user. These sketchy websites promise the buyer "real" followers that may engage with your profile. While this is a quick "fix" to this "issue," these websites shouldn't be trusted with someone's credit card information. Even if these followers were real, there is no way of knowing who they are, some of these followers could be predators.
Unfortunately, children who are doing this do not know this--and if they do know they're choosing to ignore it. I tried to do a little bit of research to see if there were any cases of something like this happening, but I could not find anything specifically relating to buying followers. Social media platforms are trying to combat this problem by deleting the bot/fake accounts, but it is like a hydra--deleting one fake account will create five more.
