The idea that the Internet is the place that embodies the words from the old hymn "who was nothing, that will be everything," no one is surprised. However, as recent trends show, today it is not necessary to have some talent in order for the whole world to know about you. All it takes is ingenuity, awareness and a small amount of money.
A few months ago, Quartz blog author Kevin Ashton conducted a curious social experiment, the results of which clearly deserve the attention of those who follow the development of the Internet and are generally interested in man as such. But first, let's get acquainted with the young man who is depicted in the illustration. His name is Santiago Swallow, he has a “proven” Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers and daily utters thoughtful maxims, such as:
“Before you lose weight, find hope”
Or something like this:
“Writing is like living forever”
Swallow is a typical product of the Internet: “speaker and thinker”, specializing in “rethinking himself in the online era”. It is also one of the most prominent participants in the prestigious TED conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design) and one of the headliners of the South By South Show (SXSW) in Austin. His biography on Wikipedia tells why: after all, Santiago is "Mexico-born American motivational speaker, consultant and author, whose speeches and publications focus on understanding contemporary culture in the era of social networks, global interconnected media, user content and the Internet." This person “makes every effort to help others learn more about how the media and individuals can be manipulated in the 21st century.”
Known for her “balanced and neutral point of view”, Wikipedia also reports that Swallow’s opinions may be contradictory in some cases, especially his prediction that “personality decomposition will lead to a revision of the standard definition of disassociative personality disorder to include only those egos that appear in the online world. ”
If you absolutely did not understand anything from the previous paragraph, then you should purchase the book Ego: Fictional Persons in the Internet Age, which will be published later this year. This information, by the way, is confirmed by its Wikipedia page, as well as the official website (santiagoswallow.com) and twitter feed.
However, there is something that you will not be informed about online. The fact is that Santiago Swallow from start to finish is a figment of the fantasy of the author of this study, Kevin Ashton. However, everything besides this circumstance is true: he does have Twitter with tens of thousands of readers, a biography on Wikipedia, as well as an official website. However, he did not visit either TED or South By South West, and he does not write any books either. (Note: at the time of the release of the original of this article, Santiago Swallow's account on Twitter was blocked, and the article in Wikipedia was closed).
In total, the creation of Santiago and the online evidence of its existence took two hours of one April day and 68 US dollars. His name was generated using the text editor Scrivener, which is used by writers. Among the other options, which issued the car were: Alonzo Arbuckle, Leon Ling, Phil Portlock and Judson Jackman. Santiago Swallow of all this company was the most attractive. Then this fictitious person got an account in Gmail, and then on Twitter.
After that, Kevin went to fiverr.com to find people who sell followers on Twitter. As a result, for $ 50 he managed to buy Santiago 90,000 readers, each of whom, as the seller assured, will join his list of followers within two days. Then the creator generated the face of Santiago. To do this, he found several photos on Google and merged them into one using the trial version of the Adobe Lightroom program.
Santiago's “Verified” Twitter account was obtained after Kevin used one trick. He set up on the account page a background image on which a white check mark in a blue circle was painted, exactly to the right of the place where Santiago's name was displayed. Many people will not be bothered by this trick, however, some of this will seriously force them to believe that they have a celebrity account in front of them. By the time Kevin filled out this page, tens of thousands of followers had already reached Santiago, and he had not even written a single tweet yet.
To get the new hero of the Internet to tweet, Kevin used the TweetAdder service, which automatically writes, follows and retweets on behalf of Santiago. To make it clear that the character is not far from the hipster values, his tweets abounded with various trend phrases like “phablet”, “startup”, “Steve Jobs”, “mobile technologies”, “Tom's shoes”, etc. Well, in order to bring the number of records to a decent level, Kevin set up TweetAdder so that messages appear once a minute, and on behalf of Santiago's account retweets of records containing the aforementioned sacred words are carried out.
Then an attempt was made to create an entry for Winkipedia for Swallow, which ended in success, despite the heightened attention of the creators of the encyclopedia to various personalities who fraudulently tried in this way to glorify and perpetuate themselves. The text of the article was borrowed from the biography of Peter Drakler - another management thinker. In order not to arouse suspicion, Kevin had to make a deep rewrite of this biography. And finally, a WordPress site was created, which cost $ 18.
The example of Santiago Swallow shows how easy it is to mislead those who are looking for information about people on the Internet, as well as how trustworthy this information really is. Kred, founded by PeopleBrowsr, a Californian company, assesses the degree of influence of people based on their activity and status in social services. The company claims that global corporations such as Procter & Gamble and Budweiser are among its clients. So a day after the appearance of Santiago Swallow, a letter from Kred came to him, in which it was reported that his degree of influence equals 754 points out of 1000 possible. If companies such as PeopleBrowsr are so easily fooled, then it can be expected that most ordinary people can buy such artificial glory. Indeed, can tens of thousands of followers on Twitter be mistaken?
An unfair game with an online rating is no stranger to those who, in theory, do not need such tricks at all. Suffice it to recall the scandal with US presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who in one day did not understand where 117,000 new readers appeared on Twitter. A similar story happened to Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, who was found out that out of 475,000 of his followers, 19% were fake, and 41% were inactive.
On the other hand, if any celebrity has fake readers, it’s not at all necessary that this person paid them. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama also managed to be noted as account holders with a lot of “dead souls” on Twitter. In fact, on average, only 28% of readers of the most popular accounts are real people. The rest are either inactive or non-existent followers. This means that of the 38 million followers of Justin Bieber, only 15 are living people. Similarly, you can get disappointing statistics for other celebrities.
How many real followers were Santiago Swallow, now it is impossible to find out. However, following the adage “fisherman sees fisherman from afar,” a man named Scott Steinberg, with more than 150,000 followers, including the Buy TW Followers reader service, proudly wrote: “I was very pleased to speak at ". How do we know this? He was retweeted by Santiago Swallow.
The article is based on materials .
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