Social Network Doping: Fake Fans as the New Social Capital

• In Event: Online Social Capital

Abstract

The growing importance social media play in the political, economic, and social spheres has, for better or worse, also been accompanied by an obsession with increasing “likes,” “+1's,” “retweets” and other related metrics on these platforms. This has given rise to a “fan farm” industry that buys and sells these metrics like commodities, a phenomenon overlooked in scholarship and generally perceived as unsavory at worst and unethical at best in mass media and business forums. Drawing from fan farm and consumer discourse, this paper qualitatively analyzes the rationales offered for purchasing metrics and proposes the concept of “social network doping” to explain how this practice is framed as a performance boost.

Authors

• Douglas Schules, Rikkyo U

• Hsin-Yen Yang, Fort Hays State University