The social web is scammier than ever

Bots, giveaways, crypto scams — everyone is trying to figure out a way to grow on social platforms, which have become increasingly hostile to, well, growth. And no, this is not just a problem on X, the website formerly known as Twitter and the current rotting core of the internet. It’s happening everywhere.

According to a year's worth of data tracking the biggest accounts across every major social platform, 2024 is officially the year of pay-for-play growth. This is having a profound effect on not only which accounts are growing, but the content they're making.

The foundation of the social web was built on the promise of democratizing people’s voices and breaking down cultural arbiters. What made early viral content so different — and so much more exciting than what we were seeing on television or hearing on the radio at the time — was that anyone could post something and have it dominate conversations around the world. A Twitter user in Pakistan scooped the world's media and live-tweeted the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound; a musician like Gotye could upload an earworm to YouTube and have it conquer the airwaves; a cat posted to Reddit could become bigger than Garfield. But the 2010s boom time for social media is over, and not just for publishers and brands. Individuals and creators are being choked out, too. 

There’s a high bar for going viral now, and it’s constantly moving and more frequently controlled by platforms. Some platforms have increased the requirements needed for content to spread. For example, Instagram and TikTok fight over exactly how long short-form videos need to be in order for their respective algorithms to boost them to other users. While more traditional social networks like Facebook continually tweak the weight of likes, shares, and comments (currently, Facebook seems to be boosting religious content). YouTube has rolled out a feed for short-form videos to compete with TikTok and TikTok is now promoting longer videos to compete with YouTube. Even Google Search has undergone labyrinthine changes to its top-results algorithm.

So it's no surprise that users hungry for an audience — or the illusion of one — are experimenting with buying growth, in oftentimes nefarious ways, instead of jumping through algorithmic hoops to build one semi-organically. And no one has figured out how to convert money into online popularity more efficiently than the king of YouTube, MrBeast. 

Also known as Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast has traveled a long road to make his account YouTube’s biggest — a milestone he reached this month. Although he had been making videos for years, Donaldson’s first viral success was in January 2016, when he spent three hours counting to 10,000 in one sitting. A year later, he spent 40 straight hours counting to 100,000, which netted him 6 million views in a week and got him into The Huffington Post, VICE, and the Daily Mail.

That attention translated to money via YouTube ad revenue and sponsorships, which he started to invest back into the channel. He did his first giveaway a few months later, when he promoted another marathon video — this time, he read the longest English word — by offering a $500 gift card. Shortly afterward, he posted the first of many videos in which he gives away large amounts of money. Since then, he’s given away millions of dollars, both to charitable causes and randomly selected subscribers.

Donaldson is very up-front about how these giveaways are meant to gain attention, subscribers, and goodwill. In his own words, he’s “reinvested everything to the point of — you could claim — stupidity” into his YouTube channel. Understandably, that has led to a lot of imitators, many of whom have more nefarious and scammy aims, especially those involved with cryptocurrency.

Last October, Memeland, the crypto game made by the infamous meme site 9GAG, opened to the public. It offered crypto tokens to users who followed several of the brand’s accounts on X. Within a week, three of these became the fastest-growing X accounts that weren’t Elon Musk. 

Unlike MrBeast, however, Memeland is giving away highly volatile cryptocurrency, not actual money, which means the users following the accounts have a financial stake in promoting them. If Memeland shuts down, their crypto is worthless. It’s a classic pyramid scheme given a new twist: because X is overrun with bots, it’s no big deal for people to create fake accounts for more tokens. Since Memeland launched, seven other crypto-based games have cracked the top five most-followed X accounts.

It's not just accounts buying engagement these days — even the platforms can't resist juicing the numbers. In January, MrBeast uploaded one of his YouTube videos to X after Musk publicly urged him to support the site’s pivot to video. The video put up impressive engagement numbers, but it was quickly found that X was secretly promoting it as an ad. It's unclear if Donaldson was aware, but an X employee told us at the time that the company did not consider it an undisclosed ad because the boost was due to a sponsored Shopify pre-roll that played before Donaldson’s video.

Either way, thanks to the extra promotion, Donaldson became the only person since Musk bought the site to gain followers at a higher rate than him. More importantly, Musk could boast that X was able to deliver traffic on a similar level to what Donaldson was getting on YouTube. 

Since the beginning of the year, we've spotted similarly suspicious engagement all over the social web. Take YouTube, which has not made much of an effort to curb inauthentic activity. In March, a Cocomelon-like kids channel called ChuChu TV gained over 20 million new subscribers in 48 hours. According to statistics from Playboard, none of the channel’s videos showed meaningful increases in engagement during or after playing, suggesting the huge leap was likely completely inauthentic.

In April, to promote her new album, Billie Eilish partnered with Instagram to add every single one of her followers to her Close Friends list. She gained over 7 million followers in two days. A few weeks later, MrBeast announced he was giving away 26 Teslas to his Instagram followers to mark his 26th birthday. Before the winners were picked, his account gained over 4 million new followers. There’s less evidence these accounts are inauthentic, but the growth was the direct result of enticing followers with exclusive content, whether that’s posts or the chance to win a car.

In May, things got hotter. A YouTube channel that plays background music for cafes called “Cafe Music BGM Channel” gained 10 million subscribers over two weeks. Unlike ChuChu TV, the growth was spread out a little to seem less suspicious, but there’s no confirmation those new subscribers are watching any of the channel’s videos. Yet that has nothing on Hamster Kombat, another crypto game that launched in March. Its YouTube channel was created on May 24 and got 14 million followers in just over a week. Its X account is also the fastest-growing crypto game on X, and the second-fastest-growing account overall behind Musk.

These figures would have been unthinkable a year ago. In 2023, the only accounts to gain over a million followers in a month belonged to Musk, MrBeast, and soccer journalist Fabrizio Romano. Counting the Memeland accounts, we’ve now seen 10 accounts get a million new followers in the past eight months. Similarly, on YouTube, MrBeast had only a single month in 2023 where he gained more than 10 million subscribers. Since December 2023, we’ve seen seven other accounts gain that many.

Such trends have been escalating for months — in May, we saw inauthentic growth almost everywhere we looked. Historically, the only thing that reliably stops people from buying online popularity is when social platforms themselves take steps to curb such activity. Other than Elon Musk’s occasional mentions of removing bots from X, we haven’t heard anything recently on that front, which suggests we haven't seen these scammy trends peak yet. But it's just as possible that this is the new norm. For years, we've heard that digital media would topple mainstream media structures, but what we didn't account for is that digital media would become just as bad as some of them in the process.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.