This article follows photographer Jack Latham inside a click farm on the top floor of a Hong Kong hotel. Hundreds of phones were wired to computers, and eight young workers liked or followed whatever client profile came up. Each phone can change its IP address 20 times a day, so one phone is basically 20 accounts. Latham even tried it on his own book launch: he got 8,000 likes in 30 minutes, and someone bought the book because it looked popular. Coming from the entertainment industry, this felt less like a weird internet story and more like a normal part of the business.

When I worked on scouting potential artists for an entertainment company, one of the first things we checked was whether an account’s numbers were real. Someone could have 200k followers but only 30 comments per post, and half of those were the same emoji from accounts with no profile picture. That’s exactly the fake follower thing in this section, and it affects real business decisions. Companies use follower counts to decide who to sign, and brands use them to decide who to sponsor. So fake follower bots don’t just fool people scrolling online. They are actually move real money, and they hurt artists with smaller but real fanbases who get passed over.

I think this analogy makes computers easier to understand because they do not directly understand human language. It makes me wonder how much meaning can change when our instructions go through different programming languages or layers before the computer can process them.

I think this is one of the biggest problems with new technology. Just because something can be created does not mean it should be created, especially if it could affect people’s privacy or safety. Tech workers should think about these consequences before releasing new technology instead of waiting until problems happen.