Nowadays more and more people use social media to do some advertising or public relations. Many of them choose to use money to buy some likes or followers in order to have high engagement and satisfactory KPI data.


“Essentially, we are all professionals at making reality look like an elaborate photo story of the sheer perfection that composes our lives. But it isn’t real. Social media is harmless if we are careful to remember that simple fact. …That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We aren’t the people we pretend to be online…”


Do likes really mean you are liked? This project aims to research the cost of social media likes. I'm spending one dollar on multiple platforms— Instagram, Facebook, Sina Weibo, etc.—purchasing likes for statistical results. The interesting thing I have observed is that people who like my posts often have a fake account, or some of them don’t have posts, but have followers. Even without hashtag, without comments they have lots of likes in each post.


Maybe it’s time we throw a little reality back into social media. Otherwise, we’re going to have to start changing that witty tagline to something more fitting. This is a parody account, and is in no way associated with the real person it depicts.