51. Behind the Likes: What Small Business Owners Must Know About Social Media Fraud
Welcome everybody to episode 51 of Unhacked. Guys, like I say every week, Unhacked, bit of a misnomer. Here's the truth. Ninety seven percent of breaches can be prevented by doing the basic cybersecurity measures. We talk about that week after week.
Justin:We give you that formula. But what we cannot do, in fact, is unhack you once you get breached. So today, we've got a special guest who he he's gonna go we're gonna dig into a little bit of the social media side of things. What's going on in the past? What's going on now?
Justin:And what as business owners we really need to know and understand about social media? Real quick, I'm gonna introduce myself and then Mario, and then we're gonna bring on our guest. I am Justin Shelley, CEO of Phoenix IT Advisors. And I help you make money with technology, and then I help you protect it from the Russian hackers, the government auditors and assessors and penalty collectors, And finally the attorneys who are going to come hoover up anything that might be left if you were to get breached. So that's what I specialize in.
Justin:Work in the great state of Texas and Nevada and Utah. I've spread all over the place these days. Today, as always, I'm here with my good friend, Mario. Mario, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and who you do it for.
Mario:Mario Zake, CEO of Mastech IT. We're located in New Jersey. We're at the side of Manhattan. I've been in business for twenty one years now. We work with, small to medium sized businesses, helping them with all the technology needs, keeping them protected not only from the Russian hackers, but from the people in China and all those other countries that's Justin doesn't wanna work with.
Mario:I don't
Justin:like the Russians.
Mario:And and like I said before, we specialize in key in helping business owners sleep better at night.
Justin:It sounds good, Mario. Always a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for being here week after week.
Mario:My pleasure.
Justin:And now we are gonna introduce Tim. Tim, say hi. Thank you for being here today.
Tim:Justin, thanks for having me. My name is Tim O'Hearn. I'm an author who wrote Framed, a villain's perspective on social media. There is
Justin:This book right here, is that the one? That is it. This is a big book, Tim, and I am gonna read it like I promised you before. I will confess I have not read the entire book as of this recording. So let me tell the audience a little bit about you.
Justin:And then I want you to fill any gaps that I leave. Here's what I understand, Tim. You are a software engineer. I I've got a pause there. What are your favorite languages?
Justin:And I mean, with AI, is this going away? Two questions. Go. What do you got?
Tim:Primarily, I code in Python. I've done Python. Think from, like, yeah, C plus plus Java as well. So the, question of is it going away? I would say probably not.
Tim:A lot of what I've done has been highly domain specific. So many companies that I've worked at wouldn't really entrust, AI with some of the things I've done and the precision, required is not really, not really feasible currently. So I think Python's still a pretty safe bet, but I don't know if I would give that same advice to someone who's just going into college today.
Justin:I mean, that's a great great point. What would you suggest if somebody was going to college right now? I'm gonna come back to your intro. Don't worry. But I'm I'm just getting ready to launch my college career, and I wanna be a software developer.
Justin:What are you gonna tell me?
Tim:I would go all in on math and hard sciences. Really? Basic, like, yeah, I would go all in on math and some statistics depending on what type of college you're in and if you can get classes through the, like, statistics taught by the math professors, not by the business professors, and then also a much deeper understanding of things like physics.
Mario:Little fun fact for you. When I started college, I was an information science major, and I did c plus plus. And, you know, I was kind of frustrated with the, you know you know, trying to, you know, make sure I didn't miss, like, any commas or exclamations in in the coding and stuff like that. And then for me, it was calculus. I couldn't get past calc one.
Mario:I took that shit three times. And I'm like, forget this. I ended up because of calculus, I ended up changing majors, and I'm like, I don't wanna have anything ever to do with programming or calc. So I switched and never looked back.
Justin:I mean, I don't wanna brag Mario, but I got the way all the way to calc three before I just, like, one day had this existential crisis in the middle of class. I'm like, I have no goddamn idea what they're talking about anymore. Like forget about solving the problem. I don't even understand what we're talking about. And and that was when I I just said, screw this.
Justin:I'm gonna be Bill Gates. I'm gonna drop out of college and I'm gonna start my own business. This is not advice to you youngsters, but I like Tim's advice much better. Okay, so back to introductions. Tim, I understand you have created at your own admission some of the most pesky and effective bots to ever be unleashed on social media.
Justin:I want a little bit more information there. Tell me about these bots you made and why are they pesky?
Tim:Later in the twenty tens on sites like Instagram, it was pretty common to make a new post with a given set of hashtags and start attracting some comments and some likes from accounts you had never seen before. This appeals to us greatly as humans because we enjoy the interaction and we enjoy it when people are patting us on the back, so to speak. But really one of the things that happened during that time was people like me created bots that found these new pictures with these new hashtags and interacted with them. And the point was that you could, algorithmically find these posts and then interact with them in order to get something back. So maybe if I follow you, there's a 10% chance that you'll follow me back.
Tim:If I do that a couple times per day, who cares? But if I'm able to do that, you know, industrially with thousands of actions per day, it can have a meaningful result. Right? The reciprocation is meaningful, and that was my entire business. So the system that I built, at a company which I code named Shark Social was entirely based on this model called follow unfollow, which attracted, reciprocal actions specifically on Instagram.
Justin:Interesting. Okay. And you did this relatively recently. Right?
Tim:Things began in 2017, and the final iteration of the business was in 2022. So it was recent in that I began writing about it while it was still going on. But the book, of course, was not published until a few years later.
Justin:Yeah. Got it. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the book. This came out in February, right?
Justin:Very hot off the presses. What it you know, and like I said, I have not read the entire 2,516 pages yet. Actually, it's what is it? 400? Listen, I have a 400, so if it's more than about 15 pages, I kinda cry.
Justin:So give me if I were to feed this into chat GPT and say summarize this for me, what what would it spit back out?
Tim:Succinctly, it's the complications of the Internet age.
Justin:Okay.
Tim:And beyond that, if we're thinking about the extra paragraphs and all the em dashes that chat GPT might introduce there, There's a lot in that. It's not necessarily a narrative, a chronicle of my life. More so, it's a chronicle of the Internet, meaning from early web two point o, so MySpace times, all the way through TikTok. What was the same? What was different?
Tim:Not just from the technology standpoint, but also from the perspective of consumer psychology. So why were people doing these weird things that they were doing on MySpace in 02/2008? And by 2018, why were these things not considered weird at all? How did, you know, life evolve around the Internet? So What were these weird things?
Tim:So the main practice, which I address in one of the opening chapters, it was called Myspace whoring. So if you were on Myspace, and back then we had a lot of new terms that were emerging from, like, you know, emo music and scene like, different subcultures, I would say, in America, there was this concept of the attention whore, which we saw in, like, several movies at that time, but it really was someone who was obsessed with getting more attention. And once the Internet became more accessible, especially people got broadband Internet in 02/2006, '2 thousand '7, and so on, we were able to see these people who desired that validation come to exist in the digital space. And MySpace was really one of the first places where that existed. And it became a practice known as MySpace whoring as a shorthand for attention whore.
Tim:But as time went on, I think kids like me, if you were like 13 years old on Myspace, you didn't really think of it as an attention whore. You were just very much interested in that it was like a salacious term, like, oh, it's a whore. So like, what is that? What does that mean? And so it attracted a lot of people to it.
Tim:But what it means for the Internet today is that this was the first place where we've positively identified people willing to negatively affect their user experience and disrupt the experience of those around them just to increase those digital metrics, meaning friend count on Myspace. Whereas today, we don't think twice about it. On Myspace, it was totally new. And I'll tell you this, if you had 2,000 friends on Myspace in 02/2008, your news feed or whatever semblance of a news feed, it was basically unusable.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I imagine. Because now the algorithm sort filter and well, I mean, honestly, they they do what they they push whatever to the top they want us to believe. That might
Mario:be the the most.
Justin:Yeah. That might be a subject for a different different episode. I don't know. So okay, Tim. You you did this up until '22.
Justin:You've been writing a book. What's your day job now?
Tim:Currently, I'm all in on writing. I spent most of my twenties. My primary employment was in quantitative trading. So I worked at different, proprietary trading firms, meaning we didn't have we're like hedge funds without customers, so to speak. And it's a very unique place in that the innovation is very rapid.
Tim:The pace of change is very rapid. The problems are really exciting. And frankly, the compensation is great too. For me, it's allowed me a lot of freedom, both to take long periods of time off to pursue other things and to just kind of consider what I want to do with my skill set. So going into this year and really even late last year, I started to realize that the book was taking so long that I needed to finally split up these different aspects of my life.
Tim:And the way that it went there, I think everything worked out well and that I decided to take a break. And that break allowed me to not only publish Framed, but also work with an editor and a promotional team who helped me put out the best product despite the fact that I was an independent author.
Mario:Okay. And so you said you right now, you're you're doing on a daily basis, you're just writing. Are you talking about writing code or writing more books? Or
Tim:Most of my activities so far this year has been directly related to Framed itself. So that's both, like, writing my newsletter, writing my blog, doing promotional work for it. I also do sports journalism as well. So there's been quite a few articles there. Like just this week, I interviewed Allison Felix, is like the most decorated, track and field athlete in history.
Tim:So I've been doing both a combination of like writing there, supporting my book, and then of course trying other efforts. But if there's one thing that the journey taught me, it's that you could spend your entire life writing the next one or like writing the first So I'm hesitant to say, oh, there's a new book coming or there's a new something coming, just because I can appreciate now just how insane of an effort it is and knowing that that you probably shouldn't tell people until you're, like, 90% of the way there.
Justin:Do you do you have a guess on how many hours you spent writing this book?
Tim:I could say this. As far as content, going into Thanksgiving, I was well over a hundred thousand words. Well, well over probably about a 15,000. The manuscript that I gave to my editor in late January was about a 50,000, which we then got down to a 36,000. I can say that in terms of hours just between Thanksgiving and getting the book out, you know, let's say, into mid March, it was roughly just to put it simply, I was putting in forty hours per weekend for most of that period while working a normal job and while also training at a pretty high level as an athlete.
Tim:So to extrapolate that out, we were definitely talking well over a one thousand hour project.
Justin:Yeah. That's a lot. My hats off to you. Mario, you got any questions for Tim before we kind of jump into the meat of this thing?
Mario:No, no, let's do it. Let's do it.
Justin:Alright. So Tim, this is a cybersecurity podcast. And again, our goal is to protect the business owners, Because here's the bottom line. We're busy, right? I mean, you're talking about all these hours you spent writing a book.
Justin:No matter what we're doing, it becomes almost obsessive, right? It's just like day and night, I eat, breathe, sleep this stuff. I'm up at 06:00 working, Sometimes I'm up at 04:00 working. Hell, sometimes I'm up at two in the morning because I can't sleep working and I work from home so I can do that. Right?
Justin:There's no shutoff. I worked all weekend long. I took a break to go out in the yard for a few minutes to to just get some exercise and some sun and do some yard work. But otherwise, I am hyper focused on growing my business and delivering a product. I live in the world of cybersecurity and if I'm being completely honest, completely transparent, I don't always think about everything that I should and as far as protecting my business from these threats.
Justin:Being again honest, the reason I do this podcast is to combat that. My natural instinct is to focus on one thing, I get distracted too easy. So this is the problem that I believe most business owners face. We don't know what's going on outside of the world where the empire we're trying to build. Now we're bringing in something that I don't know that's ever really crossed my mind as I'm making all these confessions is the social media.
Justin:I mean, does cross my mind. I think about it a lot actually, but I don't really dive into it. So let's dive into how is you know, the the stuff that you've done and the stuff that you see going on out there with social media, how could that impact a business owner and what do we need to be aware of? If we just start at the very high level and then we'll kind of break this down into details.
Tim:Sure. We can get the most technical aspect out of the way first and decide how deep we want to go. But I think what's most relevant to listeners of a cybersecurity podcast is that there are many, vectors of attack, in the cybersecurity space. And one that was actually central to building my business and improving my product was API hacking. So you've probably seen Corey Ball's book called Hacking APIs.
Tim:And it's not hacking in the same breaking and entering, like Trojan horse virus type space. What it means is you're accessing an API, so an application pro programming interface that might be exposed internally. So this is not necessarily a small business owner problem, but anyone who is in the software space could leave something exposed that then leaves them vulnerable to an attack, to a hacker, so to speak. And this is relevant to what I did when I was at Shark Social in that the entire business was based around reverse engineering code functionality that was provided by Instagram and then building the business around that. So that's one thing where, yeah, it was hacking.
Tim:We weren't, necessarily, like, harming Instagram directly in the same way that a hacker might hurt your clients, but it's still a relevant practice.
Mario:Now in this to kind of put things together for some of our our audience that may not know what an API is, like, it it's it's just Tim, correct me if I'm wrong. It give software gives the ability for programmers to use this code to integrate in, you know, incoming and outgoing from their program. Now to relate it to a previous podcast that we had, you know, Justin, like, with with your customer that wanted to have this third party company integrated into their medical software, if if that medical software had an API that was vulnerable for somebody to hack into it, they could essentially hack into a third party company, which could, you know, essentially then, you know, affect the medical software and the medical practice and their data. So it could be, you know, a big chain of attacks that could end up leading to something similar. Correct?
Tim:Yeah. I would say, generally speaking, the hack is not necessarily as destructive or as, pen deeply penetrating as we would think a typical cybercrime attack. But it could be something as simple as, okay. Well, the API isn't protected against a denial of service attack. So maybe you have Cloudflare set up in front of your your website or whatever, but you forgot about Cloudflare or some load balancer for this route you left open.
Tim:So you're still vulnerable. Even though the loss at the end of the day might just be AWS charges, it's still disruptive. And the way I think a listener can understand this is that it's not this type of, like, black gloved superhuman, like, hacker who knows all the special codes. It can be thought of as you take your phone out, you're on Instagram. You tap a button, which we know is synonymous with like.
Tim:So you like a picture. So it might say, Tim likes Justin's picture. The translation layer there, it doesn't translate it to French. It's actually still in basically plain English, just with a little bit more syntactical structure there. So when that makes it to Instagram's private API, it is as simple as API slash v two slash Tim slash relationship slash Justin picture one slash like, more more or less.
Tim:So essentially, it's just structured in a way that looks totally similar to a directory to a directory structure on your own computer or in the structure of a URL. And that's what these web APIs are. They're just URLs.
Justin:So if you know the if you know what what that URL is looking for, first of all, you've gotta have the actual URL. But after the URL is where they put all the information. Right? And if you know what they're looking for, that's how you can get in there and and manipulate things.
Tim:Yeah. That's true. So it could be a query parameter or it could be built into the route itself, and that kind of gives way to the practice of sniffing, which is probably outside the scope of what we wanna talk about here. But Yeah.
Tim:Right. It's it's kind of up to the the attacker to decide how they're going to uncover it, they're gonna build upon code that's already been released, or if they're gonna take their best guess. Like, for example, I would guess if there's something called like, there's probably also something called comment because those are the features that I'm used to having on Instagram. So sometimes intuition guides us in ways where typical sniffing techniques, maybe don't work the same way.
Justin:So, you know, when when we talked before, you and I chatted for a few minutes before the recording, you talked about intentions, you talked about how we can identify fake activity, and and I wanna get into that, but at first I wanna ask, why does it matter? Why why do we need to worry about fake activity? And again, in in the business world, is there damage? Because what you did before is you helped businesses gain followers and I'm putting that in quotes, likes, right? Whatever it's social currency, It's trust.
Justin:It's credibility. Right? That's that's what they're buying from you. Is that is that fair?
Tim:That is fair.
Justin:Okay. So what's the danger in that?
Tim:If you're able to buy this social currency, it's akin to entering a cheat code. So where everybody shows up, at the start of the day and they think, okay. Here's what I expect from someone with 10,000 followers. Here's what I expect to with someone from a hundred thousand followers. Regardless of how long you've been on the platform for, you likely have some model for understanding these, you know, certain levels of of of importance.
Tim:The problem is that if it becomes so easy to buy and to fake, then also, any authenticity, including of real accounts, suddenly loses its meaning as well. So regardless of the fact that to get there, possibly extremely disruptive things have to happen to get these accounts to like one account or to follow one account. But also that, at the end of the day, if it goes unchecked, then users en masse will lose confidence in the metrics to begin with.
Justin:Okay. So first, you're gonna trust things that you shouldn't be trusting, and then we're just gonna say this whole system's screwed. Right? Kind of in a nutshell.
Tim:It it quickly gets to this very, very cynical view of what's going on, what is the Internet actually. I would give the I would make the point that the business I ran was not purely fake. It was actually logging into customer accounts. So although I controlled fake accounts to do certain things mainly along the lines of testing, I never had access to a massive botnet of 10 to a hundred thousand accounts. That was kind of in the previous era.
Tim:But the danger in somebody being able to control those just to give you a harmless like is that they could also participate in a massive propaganda campaign. And that's what we started to see when people started talking about it in you know, interference in elections where you're like, yeah. If you have even a thousand accounts and now you're using AI to write comments and to astroturf discussions, that's really all you need to sway people in one way or another. Forget a hundred thousand. But the biggest players, right in that spot in 2017 when I started getting involved, The biggest players had hundreds of thousands of accounts, and they could just create them no problem.
Tim:For us, it was a little bit different, and we never got into that the darkest the darkest part there. Gotcha.
Justin:Mario Puckus, how many social media likes do you have?
Mario:Likes? I
Justin:don't know. I
Mario:think I could count them on my hand. One hand. Yeah. I mean, honestly, there's times where I have to go on to, like, my personal account to go, like, my my business account one, and then sometimes we'll post something and get, like, a a hundred likes. You know, it really depends on on on what it is and, you know, the topic.
Mario:Some things, you know, do better than others. You know, anybody in the social media world will will Yeah.
Justin:I think I cut you off. You're gonna ask a question. Let's go back to that.
Mario:Yeah. I I forgot it. No. So my my question was, and if I could remember real quick, is this so this this happens on a daily basis, this, you know, just mass liking and and stuff like that? And is it on every platform?
Mario:Is it on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn?
Tim:On some platforms, I would like to think that it's been cleaned up. And my point would be, if it hadn't been cleaned up on Instagram, there's a shot that I would still be doing it. You know? So, like, on Instagram, it's not necessarily something where we've seen, it proliferate. It really stopped around 2022, which is around the same time that I stepped away from the business.
Tim:But on you know, the thing is about the other platforms is that on Reddit now, we see a lot of this different type of astroturfing and a lot of different type of interference that is directly probably drawing to this type of, you know, bot bot behavior. So it's becoming more profitable, but it's also becoming much, much more, restricted, by the platforms themselves because the platforms actually gain very little, from people abusing the platforms that way.
Justin:Well, you're talking about manipulating people through this I mean, basically what what you did. I've got a real world example of that. And Mario, you you introduced it, the the third party integration that we've talked about a couple times now. In in trying to vet this company, I'll try to keep the details out of it. I did go to their social media and I saw a lot of social currency attached to their social media account.
Justin:And and for a second, I almost let my guard down. I'm like, oh, everybody trust these guys. It's probably fine. And and I I'm like I said, I I really had to catch myself because that doesn't mean anything. And Right.
Justin:You know, we're we're Tim, we're talking about how do we what what does this mean for a business owner? This is something that I think we all need to really watch for. We put a lot of confidence. Well, I'll speak for myself. I put a lot of confidence in how many followers an account has or how many comments they get when they publish something.
Justin:I spend a fair amount of time on LinkedIn and I'm stupid kinds of envious of people who can throw out shit content. I'm not even gonna lie, it's it's shit. And then everybody's liking it and glazing them as the kids these days would say, and throwing stupid comments at it. And there's that envy, there's also, there's just a built in trust like, well, they must be smart, they must be connected, they must be good people, they must be a good company or whatever. So what what can we do to combat this?
Tim:We have to change everything that we've taught ourselves about social media and about these metrics. Unfortunately, in the early days, these were very, very useful metrics and they were hard to fake. On YouTube, you know, on YouTube, it's a little bit easier. The subscribers are a little bit harder to fake. Video views are a little bit harder to fake.
Tim:And I find that for any YouTube video, you know, I've evaluated tons of accounts as I've made podcast appearances as well. I can pretty easily get an idea for, like, what people actually think of the podcast and whether the podcast is actually what they say it is. On other sites, it's becoming increasingly difficult because now there's SEO, right? We have this thing where we've had, for decades, people have been selling us services of how to look more important without necessarily changing your content. So it's just this big conundrum of like, you know, faking it and then making it and ultimately just like fooling the algorithms at the end of the day.
Tim:I think the point you bring up or the question you ask is one that millions of people are asking them, especially people who are trying to make more money or generate leads, from social media, and that it's just simply very, very hard now, to differentiate, like, versus, like, kind of real, but boosted.
Justin:Yeah.
Mario:Can I just go on a little slight rant for a second? I used to love when YouTube not only had the like, but it also had the dislike button. And you can see how many people disliked that that video. Because if I'm looking for something that I'm, like, you know, googling and I wanna watch a video of it, and then I would go somewhere and had, like, three likes, but 637 dislikes. I pretty I pretty much knew that don't watch this video.
Mario:It's a waste of your time. And they did away with it. They they still can give you the ability to dislike a video, but nobody knows who the fuck dislikes the video. And they did away with the number, and I hated that. K.
Mario:That that was just my little rant, you know, because I don't know why they would get rid of them because
Tim:I do know what?
Mario:Very helpful.
Tim:Yeah. I so I and it's funny because I had another podcast earlier today, and we got on the same topic of, like, these indicators of of interest. And, in my book, I do address specifically why they eliminated the display of downvotes or or thumbs downs on YouTube. And the thought is that a lot of it comes down to, like, at the very surface level, like cyberbullying. So you never want to be seen as liable of, like, oh, this kid was trying to do x y z, and they were bullied by getting a low rating, which makes them hate themselves, I guess.
Tim:But the more commercial reason is something you're going to hate to hear, which is that no advertiser wants their ad to be played on a video that has a bad ratio of up to down. And so the big thing is that like, you know, YouTube or Google was like, oh, okay. We're gonna stop displaying it. But the real reason is probably to pander to advertisers who don't want to who start bickering over, oh, this wasn't a good video because, you know, people are just attracted to it now and it's just like this brigading thing. It's like, okay.
Tim:People are just downvoting it as much as possible. So that's probably the answer. But I do address it in the book, and I cite a couple of really good sources on it.
Justin:Follow the money. I had a friend who would always say that. Follow the money. It doesn't matter if it's business, politics, religion. Follow the money.
Mario:Can you come up with, like, some sort of program where we can paste the the URL and it shows us how many dislikes or something like that? Because, you know, the I I think that's a million dollar idea if if you know? And it's on the recording here, so, you know, I came up with it first.
Tim:Yeah. So I hear Tim. No. I I think it's a good idea. And the point I make is that I've designed persuasive technology systems, which include recommendation engines.
Tim:And to get a recommendation, you have to know what the user wants and what they don't want. What better way than to track their ups and their downs? So the truth is that Google still uses it behind the scenes to better tune the recommendation algorithms because it's what we call an explicit feedback. It's very, very clear what you mean. Whereas, like, just because you watch a video all the way through, maybe it's because you found it, like, absurd.
Tim:Right? Maybe it's that you just thought it was a joke. But an up or down is actually much better, and that's why, you know, Reddit probably has one of the best recommendation systems we've ever seen. As far as how to subvert when, like, platforms or platforms collude to strip these things away. There have been some efforts over the years to essentially provide an overlay, either for explicit up down binary feedback, but also for comments as well.
Tim:So how weird is it that when you want to comment on an article today, you are then gonna have to search and find it on Reddit and then hope that somebody reposted it to Reddit and then engage in Reddit comments there, but you're bound by the rules of whatever community it was reposted in. What if there was just an overlay in your browser that regardless of what site you were on, you could leave comments and you could see other people's comments? That's something that's been approached a lot of different times over the years. And eventually, I think it ends up coming back to like violating some type of, like, intellectual property or some type of privacy thing. But people have tried it.
Tim:And I think fundamentally, I would love it. But then the question, of course, becomes who is going to moderate the comments? And that's like this you talk about a million dollar idea, that's the billion dollar question is who's gonna moderate it once you do figure it out?
Justin:What was the question?
Tim:AI. AI
Justin:is gonna be doing all of this. Speaking of computers who have no heart and no soul, Tim, what you were doing was shady at best. Right? Well, I mean, you even say a villain's perspective. What talk to me about your your value system.
Justin:Was this what I mean, how did you sleep at night doing this? Did it did it bother you at all? Were you cool with it? Do you regret it?
Tim:I felt very cool in 2017. I was, you know, essentially 23 years old, working a wonderful day job, living in a high rise apartment in Chicago, and then making all this income on top of it, specifically working in a space that made me more cool. Right? If people went and I was like, hey, I'm doing this on Instagram, it was so much more cool than saying, hey, I'm a software engineer at this proprietary trading firm. Have you ever heard of?
Tim:And the the answer was no. None of these people had heard of the trading firm, but everyone knew what it meant to have more followers on Instagram. So at first, there's this rush of, like, of popularity, and you feel the social benefits of it in ways that are honestly quite strange. As time went on, though, I became aware of just how far customers were going to buy services like this and how much they were just putting on the hope that they could gain their followers because, you know, we would say, okay. You're gonna get this many followers per month.
Tim:You're gonna get this much exposure. But for them, they thought that was the same as building a successful business with I wish like, I'm sure both of you know that's not how you build a successful business. But, of course, if you spent thousands of dollars on it and you still didn't have a successful business, you would probably feel like shit. And a lot of times, the customers would come back to us with these ridiculous stories of of this, that, and the other thing. We're like, hey.
Tim:If we could suddenly start a successful business in any niche we chose, do you think we would be getting people more followers? No. We would have our own private equity company. Right? Like, that's that's how it would work.
Tim:So as time went on, I started to be more aware of the fact that people weren't really buying like, they really weren't putting their best foot forward. A lot of people were spending money they didn't have. We were seeing cards that get declined because they had literally zero balances on debit cards. And then for me myself, I was like, jeez. Like, this isn't what I remember about the Internet.
Tim:Like, this isn't what I loved when I started logging in in 02/2006 and 02/2007. So over time, I think part of it is just getting older. But the other part is realizing that you are operating in violation of terms of use, and you are perhaps accelerating some of these unhealthy antisocial behaviors in your customer base, but just encouraging them on the platform in general by continuing to suggest and continuing to put up marketing material, saying more followers means more social proof equals equals good. So so, yeah, ultimately, I slept at night just fine. But once we started to hear once we started to become aware of actual legal proceedings against, some of our competitors And then once we became aware of just massive shutdowns, like actual settlements, like the settle that's much scarier than cease and desist is settlement, then it actually affected my sleep.
Tim:And in some parts of the book, I kind of talk about this. We were just in this conundrum where it was really hard to run the business. The customers weren't happy. We were feeling like we like we didn't even know why we were doing it anymore. And then also, you have some customers coming to us with, like, direct threats saying, like, I know where you live and things like And that was and that was pretty much what and he did know where one of us lived.
Tim:It was and that was, like, in 2021 and 2022, we finally split it up with saying, like, you know, I don't think we're even providing the best service anymore, and it's not worth just, like, you know, pipping a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars a month from these people. So that ultimately led to the shutdown, but it was over a very long period of time that, you know, my feelings on it evolved.
Mario:I was curious. What what were what was the customers essentially bitching about because they knew what they were purchasing?
Tim:That's complicated, because we did not explicitly tell them what they were purchasing. So we were selling them a organic growth service. We did not advertise that it was actually software growing their accounts, but we also did not say that it was a human growing their accounts. YouTube would probably intuit that if you were only paying $35 a month and you're getting a thousand followers, it's probably more on the side of automation.
Mario:Yeah.
Tim:For a lot of people on you know, in our customer base, they had no idea. So sometimes they would they would be confused. Sometimes people would sign up and then provide their login details as a part of the sign up process and then say, why did you log in to my account? So sometimes there were just these natural just like, people just didn't understand what was going on. And also, Mario, like, the expectations were just outrageous.
Tim:We were pretty straightforward in saying, hey, on the absolute low end, you're gonna get 300 followers based on what we know. On the highest end, we had people getting 2,500 in the best days. But everyone has a reason to be unhappy or there was always blowback for things that didn't, you know, go their way.
Mario:And then when you shut down shut down everything, did those all those followers just disappear?
Tim:No. So the followers actually were organic. So from our perspective, it was genuine they were genuine people saying, oh, this account, that looks pretty interesting. I'll follow them back. Engineers from Meta teamed up with researchers from University of California San Diego and actually did a research study about this in 2019.
Tim:And they found basically the same thing that we found, which is that even if your account is pretty crappy, you can still get a reciprocation rate of about 8%. So if you could only put out about a hundred follows per day, you still get eight back. You multiply that by 30, that's like 240 followers a month. Most people who are just starting out and haven't reached the 10 k mark are totally happy with that, especially for 35, even for $50 a month. So after the service stopped, the followers tend tended to stick.
Tim:They tended to stick because they weren't fake. They did represent real people. But, of course, over time, they there's some decay there.
Mario:I'll just randomly, like, click on my number on TikTok, and I see all these random people just following me. They're all hoping that I at least I follow them back. That's pretty much why I'm I'm getting these random followers even though I barely post them in.
Tim:Generally speaking, they would only be doing two things. One would be they're trying to get more followers, so hoping that you follow follow them back. Or they're serving another purpose, and they need to seem more real by interacting with accounts that are not mainstream. So of course, anyone can go and follow like a celebrity. Like, no offense, you're not an a list celebrity.
Tim:But the benefit of finding someone like you is that you still are considered a subject matter expert. So if I was to go in forensically and say, okay, What is likely a fake account? It's probably someone who's following Drake rather than someone who's following Mario. And that's kind of how they can construct these things. It's actually pretty advanced of of the the lengths the bots can go to to to make their histories and their, you know, their chains of engagement seem more believable.
Mario:Interesting. That's actually really
Justin:good Yeah. So you wrote this book as an ego boost. Right? You just wanted to show everybody how cool Tim O'Harran is?
Tim:Justin, I think for anybody to write such a long book, ego has to play a part in it. And whether it's Fair.
Justin:Yes.
Tim:And, you know, and whether, you know, whether it's upholding the ego on a daily basis or it's like reading a chapter that you wrote and that you just know isn't good, you need to have some level of self belief. And at some point, like, that self belief can become delusional or even, like, maniacal in terms of, like, how firmly you must believe when you don't have a traditional, like, publishing house saying, oh, this is wonderful. Or, like, you don't have a supportive team around you. I had a couple friends, and when I sent them essays or even when I sent my mom essays, everyone said the same thing. They were like, you will hate yourself forever if you do not publish this book.
Tim:And that was how I motivated my you know, and that was how I motivated myself. And, hopefully, people can see the the evidence there. But I think, you know, ego and importance plays a part. But I'll tell you this. If there were you know, I knew personally about 10 to 12 other people who were participating in the space who had the same roughly technical background that I had, and most of these people made more money than me.
Tim:If one of these people decided to write a book four years ago, I probably wouldn't have written this. As I went through and as I tried to interview these people and, you know, reestablish contact with them, I knew that if I didn't capture these things, nobody was ever going to capture them. So I feel myself as doing, you know, a service to the Internet and the Internet I remember of preserving the history, in a way that's, know, fundamentally unbiased.
Justin:Going back to your you know, I I mentioned values and, you know, how do you sleep at night and, you know, I'm poking fun too. Right? But when when we first spoke, you said something about this book being like an act of penance. Tell me a little bit about that.
Tim:I think it's accurate to say that framed is a way that I am asking for forgiveness in perhaps not the most direct way. We have a lot of memoirs in today's world or even going back, you know, to you know, decades with sports stars and other celebrities who are looking for a second chance. I'm not looking for a second chance because I'm not a public person. So at the end of the day, nobody knows what the difference is, and I could have just slipped into the shadows, and nobody would have known either way. But for me personally, feeling like I was a part of a generation that was completely railroaded by the development of addictive technology and of Web two point zero and of having nobody on our side, nobody looking out for the kids and the teenagers when there were it was the Wild West.
Tim:I felt like I could do something decent to help the next generation and to say, this is how things could be different, and here are some of the things we could do to protect those who are under, you know, 13 years old, for example. So I feel like it's it's a way of saying, yeah, I was the villain. I mainly made money because it was cool to break the rules and because it was cool to make money. But never did I do a single thing that was purely villainous in it being destructive or it being directly harmful. And I think that is an important thing to bring up.
Justin:Fair. Absolutely. Yep. % agree with that.
Mario:So, Phil, let me ask you a question. You know, for for business owners, what what would, like when they're trying to to establish themselves on on social media, what what does Meta actually, like, care about right now? What what do they wanna see, you know, people, you know, from owners point of view to, like, put on there that's that's gonna actually grow?
Tim:Unfortunately, the main thing that they want is ad spend. It's so much harder, to go viral or to even get increased, exposure today, even compared to five years ago and especially compared to ten or twelve years ago. What we remember of this like organic, oh, hey, I make a post and all my friends see it. Today, that's almost, it's ludicrous because of the way that everything is gated and the way that the feed is constructed. It's very, very much built in a way to pressure you if you have something to share somewhat urgently to spend money on ads.
Tim:I think the second thing that they're probably looking for that a business owner can take away is that there are increasingly strict standards for content. What the content contains, what it can and can't say. And this is it goes well beyond free speech, and it goes well beyond decency. It's that each platform has this, like, moving, you know, moving spectrum of of enforcement and censorship. And I think it's important that people understand that before they take a particularly controversial stance.
Tim:I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not saying left, right, middle, who can or can't post. But I think it's worth mentioning that before someone tries to establish themselves in a particularly controversial space, to also understand that you have no control over your voice when you're on one of these platforms. You own nothing you create on one of these platforms, and one day you could wake up to it all being gone.
Mario:Interesting. And, you know, one thing I definitely noticed sometimes when especially with, like, Google and, like, Bing, you know, ads and stuff like that, is there's a lot of bots out there that that seems like it's just, you know, like, we have other things and, you know, to measure the visitors or whatever. And it seems like to me, it seems like it's a waste of money, you know, putting all this money into it because theirs is gonna take your money and you're not gonna get what you're you're actually putting into it. What's your thoughts on that?
Tim:I know I said I don't get into conspiracy theories, but, also, the opening chapter of my book does describe framed as a collection of conspiratorial diatribes. And one of the earliest diatribes that I captured in my book was directly related to bots and their effect on the efficacy of ads, specifically on Facebook. Back in 2015, I was in a class, and the class was actually really ahead of its time about monetization of, oh, you have a startup, how do you make money? And one thing I said at the time was, you know, there are rumors on the Internet that, like, 20% of all traffic that's piped through to ads on Facebook before we called it Meta, 20% of this traffic is actually bots. And as a consumer or as like a business owner, somebody running ads, you really have no way of knowing whether that's true or not.
Tim:You just have to accept that everybody's doing this and these are the numbers and this is what they tell you you're going to get or not. But at the end of the day, if there is a bot watching your ad, there's a bot watching your ad, and they are never going to convert. So it's a huge, huge problem. I would I I would say the the one thing we can have faith in is that nobody would be spending the amount of money like these, like, 6 figure monthly ad accounts and stuff. They would never be spending that if they weren't still getting conversions.
Tim:I can say for me yeah. I can say for me with my book, I experimented on every single platform except TikTok. But I was on Pinterest. I did tabula ads. I did Google ads.
Tim:I even advertised on Meta, which is probably a terrible idea. But the point is that even for low quality traffic sources, I sold books. And so that tells me that there might be a conspiracy there and maybe it's x percent more expensive because some of this traffic is just totally bogus. But at least somebody bought my book, and it wasn't one of the bots.
Justin:Yeah. Do you think there's a a correlation between your ad spend and your organic search results?
Tim:This is a controversial one as well. Okay. There are rumors that certain platforms will prioritize certain things based on your ad spend in many different ways. So for example, on Amazon, one of my best organic days ever was a day that I absolutely, blasted my spend on Taboola. And that day, I sold, like, 16 books on Amazon, which for how early it was, that was amazing.
Tim:But then you find out that Amazon actually does have this hidden algorithm where if the Amazon page is getting more traffic, then it actually will show higher in search results even if the traffic is coming from an external source. So the same point, I think, is valid on Facebook, especially where people are saying, nobody sees anything unless I pay for ads. Well, what if you're paying enough, but then you step away for a little while? Might you have some residual boost in an invisible way? I would say, unfortunately, that is probably the case where things are set up similar to a dating app where you're brought so close to maybe something that you want or something that appeals to you.
Tim:And then immediately you're faced with that wall of, okay, well, now you have to pay. And it would not be difficult to engineer this into Facebook. It would be harder than to do it on a dating app. But I've I've found that myself where I'm like, it doesn't make sense in college. I could post random stuff and get, you know, a hundred plus likes.
Tim:But then posting my book, like, I got, like, five likes every time I did it. And these are people who, like, really, really know me. So, yeah, I I think, like, I think Facebook is probably one of the craziest environments right now for running ads where I don't see really any way to be successful there organically.
Justin:Really? Interesting. Well, I'm not sure, Tim, if I'm coming away from this encouraged or depressed. But it's definitely interesting dialogue. You know, I'm just just kind of dabbling in the world of social media ads.
Justin:I haven't done them for quite a while getting back into it. And I'm not gonna lie. I was I was looking at Facebook, so now I'm scratching my head. Anyways, that that said, let's let's go ahead and wrap this up. And I just wanna we'll go around the room here figuratively speaking, of course, because we're all in separate rooms.
Justin:And let's just just key takeaways, you know, Mario and then Tim, if this was all somebody was gonna listen to, what would be the most important thing for them to hear from today's episode? Mario, what are your thoughts on that?
Mario:Bet no matter what you would do, you're kinda fucked unless you spend enough money on there. And, you know, there there's gonna be a a good amount that kind of goes to bots. You know? But, you know, at the end of the day, it's you're you're you're praying that it's going to automatically bring up some organic, you know you know, algorithm that it's gonna help you either directly or indirectly. And
Justin:if
Mario:you don't spend any money, you're not getting it.
Justin:Fair enough. Tim, what are your thoughts?
Tim:In my book, I describe social media as a tragicomedy. Meaning, it's kind of funny, but it's also a very, very terrible place. And I think what makes it worse today is that we have legions of fake pundits. And, hopefully, people come away from this chat not thinking that I'm one of them. But you have hundreds, if not thousands of people on the Internet, on social media, proclaiming expertise for things that they know absolutely nothing about.
Tim:So what I would leave listeners with is, hopefully, you read my book and you realize that I am one of the people who does know what he's speaking about. But for anyone who maybe doesn't wanna read the full 400 pages, my advice is to actually spend less time engaging with these people and to hinge less of your hopes and your business goals on social media because it's becoming more and more vicious with each day. And I think my book can get people a little bit closer to realizing that truth.
Justin:I love that. I was in a meeting this morning and they were talking about what what's working in the world of marketing and what's not. And, mean, honestly, we're we're kind of coming back full full circle post COVID to live events, human interaction, you know, with all the AI, with all the bot, with all this horse shit, the technology, you know, it's supposed to make our lives better and it's just Jesus, it's complicating things to no end. I mean, maybe it's time for us to just go grab a beer and talk business that way. That's kind of my takeaway from this.
Justin:Tim, really, really appreciate your time here today. Tell me what with this book, what's kind of your vision? What's your goal? What are you all about these days as you're kind of transitioning out of that business? Now you're writing.
Justin:What is it you're trying to accomplish?
Tim:In writing the book, I was really interested of you know, in preserving the history of the early Internet and even the things that I say were only captured by serious weirdos or other types of ethnographers. As we see local journalism lose funding and lose interest Mhmm. And basically lose viewership, I think every single person who's been on the Internet for more than a year can do their part into helping preserve their most fond memories, what they remember, whether that was last year, whether that was in 02/2005 or sometime in between. I think we have some duty here to preserve what's been talked about. And then at some point, of course, in the future to debate it and to reach greater understanding.
Tim:So my book hopefully is a big stepping stone in that. And people can come away with the same things that I enjoyed when I first logged in, which was that the Internet was this very diverse place where you can log on looking for one thing and come away, you know, engaged and engrossed by something totally different. I I have a real hope that the Internet can still be that type of destination for many people.
Justin:Okay. Perfect. And I I think if I remember correctly from our first conversation, do you have some sort of a target of how many of these books you hope to sell?
Tim:Yeah. So the goal for this yeah. Sure. I I do. This goal is probably about a thousand books for this year.
Tim:I'm very happy. I yeah. I'm very happy. I'm right about halfway there. It's over
Justin:Nice. Four
Tim:yes. It's over 400 at this point, and that's kind of what's motivating me to work on the audiobook. Of course, it's not paying my my rent here in New York City, but it is something that I'm offering well, well below the cost of other of of like books just because I wanna get the word out. So I think a thousand is a good starting point. And once the audiobook's out, we'll we'll see what's next.
Justin:Oh, I I am an audiobook fan. I I promise to read this book. I'm going to read it, but it would sure make my life easier if I was listening to it. I'm holding this up. If anybody's watching Framed, villain's perspective.
Justin:I'm trying to move my finger out of the way. Mean, framed a villain's perspective on social media. Tim, again, thank you for being here. Brilliant stuff. Myself.
Justin:I I like to believe that I spend a lot of time in a room full of people smarter than myself. You've helped me accomplish that today. So thank you for that. Mario, always a pleasure chatting with you. There again.
Justin:What you've done with your business is phenomenal. Mario, Tim, Mario just a year ago won the largest competition in the IT industry. In fact, the prize was a car. What kind of a car did you end up with?
Mario:Well, Land Rover Defender. Wow.
Justin:Like a serious competition. Mario won that. So, I love hanging around with people who are brilliant in their areas of expertise. So thank you both for being here. And with that, guys, we're gonna go ahead and say goodbye and wrap up.
Justin:We'll see you all next week. Take care.
Mario:Thank Justin, thank you, guys.
Justin:Thanks, Tim. We'll see you guys.
Creators and Guests
