Exposing Influencers Fake Underground World – OMG

Let me first start by saying this blog post is not bashing anyone, it’s just something I think we should all become more aware of. The people who create these fake worlds need to think about what they are doing and why, and their followers need to reevaluate why they follow who they do.

Again I will say social media is an amazing tool, and it allows us to share our passion with the whole world. It has allowed us the luxury of cutting out the middle man and not having to ask permission to share our magic with the world. For the creatives out there like myself, social media has been such an important tool. I’ve said this before when Jamaica’s mainstream media thought I was too much, the internet held me in her arms and told me this was a safe space. So I love social media, I love interacting with my followers on Instagram. It’s like we all know each other I see a lot of the same names in my comments all the time and I get excited.

BUT! Its get very tricky when so many of us start to idolize the people on social media with large followings. We might want to start a blog, or an online store, or put out an independent album. That’s if many of us even have a legit reason for wanting followers, sad to say many people do not know exactly why they want 100,000 followers. Do not allow yourself to be fooled by the many people on Social Media still playing the social media version of FarmVille.

Do you guys remember that game on Facebook, I was obsessed with it for maybe two months, taking care of my crops everyday and getting my friends to water my plants and take care of my animals. I would itch when I couldn’t get on my computer and check on my farm. It was a digital world that did not exist and I wasn’t making any real, worthwhile interactions from it. Many influencers are doing that today.

I have always known that a lot of people were buying followers. I mean it didn’t add up that people had 50,000 followers, would post a picture get 3000 likes, or 1000 likes and no comments or they might get 10 comments and five of them were pages saying please collaborate with us. That shade I knew about, I was like ok I know this trick. I’ve never done it, personally I’d rather be out in the real world making real friends than buying followers. But who am I to judge, I mean lets be real I’m Lauren I’m gonna judge regardless.

I started paying a little more attention to some of the people I follow, a lot of the influencers I follow. Someone pointed it out to me, then I started seeing it everywhere and I started to wonder if anyone else could see it. They join these groups with other influencers, it’s a like for like group. How it works is if I like your picture and comment underneath you have to do the same for mine. It boosts engagement and helps with your algorithm. Where it gets really fishy is when someone posts a pretty regular picture that doesn’t ignite any kind of conversation, and then the caption is even more blah, sometimes just an emoji and there are over thousand comments. Pretty normal right? But then you open the comments and 80% of them are emojis, that’s normal too right, but then you look deeper and every other person has commented ten times, ten different comments, with ten different lines of emojis and suddenly you have a picture that has 3000 comments. I saw one this week with one thousand comments and 7000 comments. It just wasn’t adding up.

There were no real people, there was no engagement, they weren’t trying to impact anything. They just wanted to be Instagram Famous, that’s it and neither them nor we know why. People were mass following hundreds of people and when the persons they followed, followed them back they would quickly unfollow fake giveaways with other influencers they didn’t even know. It’s all becoming too much, who has this kind of time I wondered.

Don’t get me wrong I love sharing my moments on the gram, I’m guilty GUILTY AF. But t go as far as to make fake moments, to create fake interaction, to just want to be IG famous for no reason. Im not sharing a passion, I’m not creating a dam thing, I’m just here for the likes??? What the actually f**k is going on. So Im saying all this to say pay attention to what you’re supporting on social media and if it’s not real why are we doing it. There’s fake it until you make it, but then there are people just faking it.

I would rather have a 100 follower who are reL people.   Who will notice that I changed my hair color and hush about a hair cut, than 40,000 people who are in a likes group just trying to boost each other’s algorithms and feed this imaginary social media ego of having more likes and comments. 

Do we owe the public anything just because we post pictures online? Yes we do it’s a public space, there are teenagers looking up to many of us and comparing themselves to what they think we have. I would rather have a 100 followers who are real people.  People who will notice that I changed my hair and gush and be excited about my new purse, than 40,000 people who are in a “Like Group” just trying to boost each other’s algorithms.