By Amisha Sharma

Brace yourselves, faithful Instagram-ers: your gloriously high follower counts may see a little dive in these next few weeks. In a recent announcement, Instagram announced that its user count has surpassed 300 million, according to CEO Kevin Systrom. But all is not well in Insta-ville: the blight of pesky fake spam-accounts and armies of robot followers persist.

Instagram has been dealing with its “spammy” problem for a while. Their first round of purging illicit accounts took place in April of this year, but apparently was not extensive enough to deter scores of companies and individuals from engaging in their chosen line of work — the sale of followers and likes, perpetuating what has been coined the “follower economy.”

As explained in a 2012 Onion video parody on so-called “social media experts,” the business of selling social media likes gets its juices from the fact that “Companies don’t care if their followers are real or not; they’ll pay you [for your social media services] either way.” In essence, there is an enormous market for social media consultants and companies which offer social media boosts to clients on Instagram as well as other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

The “value” these ridiculous companies offer is nothing but instant fake followers that boost a client’s follower count. The followers, which are generally robots, don’t repost any client content, start a conversation with the client, or interact in any way. So why would anyone want to spend actual money to get nothing but a higher number displayed on your follower count?

The answer is apparently based on the pressure for celebrities, brands, and prominent public figures to amass humongous followings on social media so that they can appear more successful. This pressure is so significant that some companies spend over $10,000 a month to buy Instagram followers and likes, according to one “social media marketing provider” called YTView.com.

Not all fees are this ridiculous, of course; one UK-based fake account seller called Rantic sells its social media marketing services for cheap. The firm sells 500 followers on Instagram for $4.99, 100 likes for just $1.45. They also sell likes on YouTube videos and shares on Google Plus.

So who are some of the individuals dropping dollars on fake social media fame? Though YTView doesn’t disclose the names of any of their 50,000 satisfied clients, other experts have tracked strange activities over the years on famous Insta accounts, the intentionality of which is debatable in some cases.

Politicians on Twitter are a great example. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Instagram gained 116,000 followers in a single day during the 2012 election campaign. When the news of Romney’s fake Insta empire broke, media experts set out to analyze other famous peoples’ social media accounts and found some surprising results. One analysis found that President Barack Obama’s nearly 19 million Twitter followers in 2012 consisted of 70%, or approximately 13 million, fake or “inactive” accounts. Boy, do we hope those fans weren’t acquired with good hard-earned American tax dollars. (PS — you can analyze your own fakey Twitter follower counts with this handy, free tool.)

It’s unclear how many of Instagram’s new 300-million-strong headcount are phoneys, but some estimates are pretty high. An employee of fake account seller Rantic guesses that Instagram’s official spammy purge would delete anywhere from 2 million to 10 million accounts. Others don’t predict such a large fraction, but agree that users actively depending on fake followers will certainly feel the effects of the sweep in their own follower counts more visibly than others.

While the follower economy will certainly take a wallop as Instagram initiates its second wave of search and destroy, this platform and others may never catch a true break. Like a never-ending game of Internet whack-a-mole, spam purges may just have to become business as usual for the world’s biggest social media giants.

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