Of course it’s fake. People crying about AI, but they have been choking on fake online campaigns for the last 20 years.

Most things online is advertising in disguise. People are paid to share, like, comment, review, and subscribe. This is nothing new.

And it is all made to look natural and organic. It works because people don’t think: they just react.

People buy bot accounts and followers. There are countless tells. The organic responses are modest, at best. It is a way to build hype, but the problem is that it drowns out true grassroots work online because it gets drowned in fakery.

This is the reason why so many “influencers” get distressed: people think they have big numbers…but they paid for it, hoping to lure more people because as a general rule, people won’t look at channels with modest views or likes. They are risk averse. So the influencer props up their numbers, hoping others will follow suit and monetize, and when it doesn’t work out, the meltdowns begin.

Big Tech makes their money either way because they nickel and dime you with their a la carte pricing plans, and their ability to get advertisers to spend money to get their analytics on their viewers, but for regular people trying to monetize, things are not what they seem: unless you are willing to spend thousands to promote yourself using the right services, it is a hard battle to gain traction.

It’s called virtual for a reason…