Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  When you find those comments, likes, or followers, your body generates dopamine—a chemical that signals to us that something good has happened. It’s part of a built-in reward system that, when abused, can be very addictive.

  Our brain gets a squirt of dopamine when something good happens—like eating a good meal or having sex. However, the apps on our phones are capable of triggering the same chemical response in our bodies.

  By introducing positive reinforcement on a randomized schedule, through notifications, these apps can create addiction-like behavior in users. It’s the same mechanism that drug or gambling addicts have been subject to as part of their hobbies or activities, and it can lead to very unhealthy behaviors.

  Just like gambling, these social media notifications are addictive. Millions of people are getting hooked. A 2018 study from Nielsen estimated the average American adult is spending over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading, or interacting with media across all devices, and about 10% of that time is devoted just to social media.14 The Washington Post reported that teens spend nearly nine hours every day on their phones alone, and much of that time is on social media.15

  There have been many studies that have concluded that social media addiction is real. Mark Griffiths and Daria Kuss are psychologists at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K. They specialize in studying the impact of technology and social media on cognitive and social behavior. Back in 2011, they were the first academics to systematically review the existing scientific literature on excessive social media use. They found that for a small minority of individuals, social media had a significant detrimental effect on many aspects of life including relationships, work, and academic achievement. They argued that such signs are indicative of addiction and are similar to what people experience with alcohol or drugs.16

  It isn’t just the academics who have noticed. The movers and shakers in the technology space know this is happening, as well. Marc Benioff, the CEO of the popular sales platform Salesforce, likened social media addiction to smoking. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and founder, has admitted that social media sits “at the intersection of technology and psychology, and it’s very personal.”17

  Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics who wrote the book The Hacking of the American Mind, says even kids can be addicted to social media. “[Social media] is not a drug, but it might as well be. It works the same way… it has the same results.”18

  The social media drug has side effects too. When you flip through Instagram, instead of feeling inspired by seeing beautiful people living seemingly perfect lives, you may notice discomfort, unease or even a sense of anxiety. This is not your imagination.

  One of the ways social media can cause anxiety is by introducing irrational standards of beauty to the user. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told me in an email exchange, “I think the picture-perfectness of photo posting to social media creates unrealistic expectations for life.” What he describes is part of a “social media hangover”—an undue anxiousness in viewers that I’ll unpack for you a bit later in the book.

  For now, I’ll just share what I think: someone who leads a perfect life has no need to tell anyone else because the telling of it does not increase its perfection.

  An Ego-Fueling Social World

  All social media platforms are built to reward one of the most sneaky parts of the human mind: the ego. Those of you who have studied mindfulness, presence, and consciousness know the very essence of this word “ego,” but let me break it down in case you’ve never dissected it.

  You’ve probably heard people say, “Oh, a guy with a big ego likes to show off his car and money and stuff.” Well, that’s certainly true. Colloquially we do use the word “ego” to mean arrogance or self-centeredness.

  However, the word “ego” stands for so much more. In traditional psychology, the word signifies the part of the mind that goes between the conscious and the unconscious. It’s responsible for reality testing and creating a sense of personal identity.

  The ego’s job is to create an identity for you, which is a story about you that you tell yourself over, and over, and over again, even if it’s a false narrative. The ego also encourages you to repeat that story to other people so that they might help reinforce it. The unconscious part of the ego can have a tremendous amount of control over your entire life if you allow it.

  This isn’t always a good thing. Reinforcing a story in this way can lead to inflexible thinking and to the generation of narratives that may not be true.

  This is where the zen part comes into it: the ego’s story is a fictional identity. It only has power over you when you let it take charge. The pictures you’re seeing on social media can only bother you if you let them.

  The real you is the silence behind your thoughts. You can watch those thoughts go by as an independent non-judgmental observer. If I’m confusing you, Eckhart Tolle explains this concept beautifully in his books such as The Power of Now and A New Earth. In it, he explains how clever the ego is into tricking you into thinking all you are is a jumble of random, often contradictory, thoughts.

  For my nerdy friends, the ego is glitchy software that takes up an obscene amount of processing power if you leave it running in the background of your mind. It can’t be disabled completely, but once you discover it’s open source you can pause it and turn off notifications to free up your mind in all sorts of delightful ways. Even better, you can choose to not use your mind at all sometimes and to let it just rest. Imagine going all day and not being bothered by anything. Now doesn’t that sound pleasant? We’ll get into how to do this a little later on.

  We’re Being Hacked

  If you believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the stuff of science fiction, then I can assure you it’s already seeping into every part of our everyday lives. Does that mean robots will exterminate humans and take over the Earth? Probably not.

  Well, maybe. We have no idea what an AI that is ten times smarter than us would want to do with itself on Earth (or beyond). For example, a horse can look at humans and have no idea why we would want to build a hospital or go to a respected sushi restaurant. Horses can’t even conceive of things like this, so how could we possibly conceive of things that AI might like to do with their time?

  AI is a big concern for major thinkers in this space, primarily because some AI will be able to reprogram themselves so they are hundreds or thousands of times smarter than humans. The gap in intelligence can easily be much greater than that between a mosquito and a human. Maybe these uber-smart AI will ignore us, the way we ignore Bonobo monkeys. But maybe not.

  The current concern is that as we march forward towards AI—a march that is impossible to stop—we are starting to see how some of the most clever algorithms in the world are already manipulating human behavior.

  How Do They Do It?

  Social media networks collect an immense amount of data from the activities of millions of users and have to figure out what, from all of this, to show you. Algorithms are the rules that help to sort and prioritize this data.

  Instagram, while they employ thousands of people, doesn’t have nearly enough employees to sort through all the photos uploaded every minute and decide which ones you might be most interested in seeing and interacting with. So, they use algorithms—mathematical rules that decide what content to show you.

  A team at Instagram decides what rules the algorithm should follow to slice and dice all of this data to create your feed. Your feed is composed of the images and posts that this team, through these hugger-mugger algorithms, calculates will be the most relevant and interesting to you. Then they present this information in a way that keeps you and me, the viewers, coming back for more. The algorithms are creating opportunities for more and more engagement without worrying if this increased engagement is unintentionally harming user psyche. With each new notification or post, we’re getting that little squirt of dopamine.

  Social media al
gorithms are infiltrating our minds and manipulating our behavior by hacking our ego software, causing us anxiety and stress. They’ve gained access to our attention and time by knowing how our minds and egos work, better than we ourselves do.

  The Black Mirror Nosedive

  On Instagram, it’s quite common to feel inadequate if your photo does not get as many likes and comments as other photos. This measurement is a very public scoreboard that encourages you to compete for the approval of absolute strangers you will never meet and who will never have any material impact on your life. It sounds silly when you put it like that. I’m sure you know that people’s reaction to your photo should have no impact on your well-being, but it’s an easy trap to fall into.

  The Royal Society for Public Health, in the United Kingdom, recently surveyed 1,500 Britons aged 14 to 24. These young people associated Instagram with many negative attributes as well as low self-esteem. The outcome? An increase in poor body image and a decrease in sleep.19 Because of social media, we feel worse about ourselves.

  As we discussed in the previous section, social media content is fed to you using specific algorithms which decide which content is the most relevant to you or will keep you on the site for longer. These algorithms can be optimized to show you a variety of different types of content, and someone is making choices regarding what that content is.

  Historically, feeds would show you posts chronologically. So you would see all, or at least most, of the posts of people you’re following, in order of most recent to oldest. This seems like it would be okay, but most social media sites don’t do this anymore. They changed that algorithm for a few reasons.

  Firstly, Instagram decided it can give you a better experience on the site by showing you posts that you are more likely to engage with. It determines which posts those are by looking at how quickly other people are clicking “like” or commenting on these posts. The goal is to keep you engaged with Instagram as long as possible so that you see more ads.

  Secondly, the non-chronological feed helps make Instagram more money. How? If you want to be sure your post is seen, you have to pay Instagram advertising dollars to make sure it appears in more people’s feeds.

  So, what happens to the user? There you are, lounging on the couch in your comfy pants and eating a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and you can’t help but compare yourself and your life to all those filtered, edited, beautiful snapshots from your friends and family. And look at how many likes they are getting! Now part of you knows there’s absolutely no need to compare yourself to anyone. But try remembering that when you go online to browse some photos and you suddenly find yourself sucked into the beautiful, glamorous, heavily-edited lives of your peers, right?

  Since most of the trendsetters on Instagram are Influencers with lots of followers, now more than ever, we’re bombarded by updates on what the popular kids are doing. We see these posts, compare ourselves to them, and find ourselves lacking. Hence, anxiety and stress.

  These social networks just keep that game going, while taking innocent minds further and further from true mindfulness and peace. Some people’s entire self-identity is made up of the social media groups they are in or the sorts of photos they post, manipulated by a set of rules in a game they don’t even know they’re playing.

  Is There Another Path?

  Okay, let’s wrap up this multi-headed hydra of a chapter so we have a solid foundation going forward.

  Instagram magically appeared and created the first major, predominantly visually-based, photo-sharing social network. Cool.

  Some Instagrammers became very popular, with tons of followers.

  The intentionally inscrutable institute of the Influencer was born and Influencers started making money.

  Other Instagram users figured this out and some of these sneaky aspirational Influencers started to buy robotic followers, likes, and comments.

  These deceptive Influencers use fabricated engagement numbers to create a false narrative—a life of perfection and popularity—all whilst getting freebies and cash from unsuspecting brands.

  Influencers are clever at making the sorts of beatific and aspirational posts that are preferred by the algorithm which itself has been engineered to elicit responses from you.

  This often causes us—the users—undue anxiety even when we don’t realize that’s what’s happening to us.

  In addition, the algorithm is designed to maximize your screen time while minimizing the opportunities you have for daily mindful moments of true meaning in your life.

  You’ll come to know that I find the idea of zen and consciousness to be particularly fascinating. I am extremely interested in how these social networks have accidentally taken us away from being a more conscious state of mind by encouraging our worst instincts. In this book, I talk a lot about my philosophy—my zen approach to social media. Maybe, just maybe, I can help a few people out there who are experiencing social-media-induced anxiety by showing that, indeed, there is another path.

  Chapter 2

  Something Fishy Is Going On

  “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

  — The Dude

  How did I figure all this out? About 18 months ago, I started noticing strange patterns inside Instagram—users with a strange number of followers, who made comments that didn’t seem quite human. Upon further investigation, I found a burgeoning Instagram black market where users could buy fake followers, likes, and comments.

  I was curious how big a problem this was so I thought it might be interesting to set up some experiments myself and help expose a few cracks in the system.

  What I found was jarring, even to me. Through the course of these experiments, I discovered just how easy it was to cheat, and the scale on which it’s happening.

  Why would anyone bother to buy followers, likes, and comments? Not only is it often annoying and egotistical, but in some cases, it’s outright fraudulent.

  Instagram users buy these followers, likes, and comments to attract brand sponsorship. Brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to woo Influencers to promote their brand—in the same way these brands use perks to woo celebrities. This sponsorship often arrives to Influencers in three ways.

  Unsolicited free stuff. In the first, this wooing shows up, unsolicited, in the form of free products—from designer clothes and first-class airplane tickets to status-symbol purses and free hotel stays. In the hope that the Influencer will spontaneously gush about the brand online.

  Formal agreements for free stuff. In the second, which occurs more often, brands (or agencies that represent the brands) will negotiate a formal agreement with an Influencer. Influencers may be given expensive cars to drive, resort stays, spa treatments to try, gadgets to test, lavish meals at posh restaurants, you name it, in exchange for name-dropping that brand in a post.

  Money, money, money. And then there’s the cash money! In the third method, on top of or instead of free products, a brand would lay down cold hard cash to buy Influencer love. This happens in just about every industry and is especially common in fashion, travel, entertainment, fitness, food, music, and beauty. This is perhaps the biggest reason, as people will do most anything to end their state of protracted penury.

  In this last method, incentives start at about $1,000 to buy a mention of a product or service from a small-time Influencer and can range up to $1 million for a major Influencer. The exact figure varies based upon how competitive a market is but is typically linked to how many followers an Influencer has and their history of follower engagement (a measurement of likes and comments on a post).

  We’ll follow the money to see who is winning by cheating the system and who the injured parties are. We’ll also talk to Instagram to find out what is being done, if anything (hint: not a lot). I will give you examples in the photography and travel industry, an area where I have some authority. But keep in mind that fake followers aren’t confined to this one
industry. They are everywhere.

  Also, if you skipped the preface, this bears repeating: I have not employed any of these devious methods to grow my own following.

  Social Network Measurements as a Fictional Construct

  Let’s talk about Social Networks on an abstract level for a moment before we dive into the sordid details. We’ll use Instagram as an example but you could plug any other social network into its spot. In many ways, the Instagram platform itself acts like a country with its own economy. It has citizens. It has a currency in the form of followers, likes, and comments.

  Now that we’ve established that the most meaningful currencies on Instagram are followers, likes, and comments, let’s take a deeper look. It turns out that these three currencies are being commodified and now have real monetary value outside of Instagram.

  For example, over the past few years, I’ve had an agreement with the Ritz-Carlton—I stay at their hotels and take destination photos that they can use to promote these locations. Annually, this relationship was worth over six figures, on top of free rooms and food for me and my team. What a deal, eh? We didn’t ask for free air travel in this situation, but it’s usually a given for Influencers entering into this sort of agreement.

  I would often post photos of Ritz-Carlton properties using the hashtag #rcmemories. My contract with the hotel chain was related to me providing destination photos and hosting live events such as art talks to invited guests. In this specific partnership, I also retained the rights to the photos, which isn’t always true in agreements of this nature. In any case, I believe I over-delivered in terms of the imagery. I’m admittedly a bit of a people-pleaser (perhaps psychologically related to my parents’ divorce and the inevitable self-blame!) and want to keep my partners more than happy.