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I think I heard you can get 10,000 Facebook followers for about $100 just a few days ago. These sort of tactics are nothing new. But they are usually pretty worthless. You need to have some kind of relationship with your followers - not to be a spammer to a large list of them.

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View inflation can create the illusion of popularity which can be incredibly vital for lots of purposes, e.g. convincing investors, building hype, etc.

If you're knowingly using inflated figure for raising investment you need to be very careful you're not committing fraud.

Ehh, people would just call it load testing or something.

A lot of book publishers now use facebook likes as a way of determining whether to buy manuscripts from specific authors--which is ridiculous because of things like fivver. I've studied this stuff for a while--I'm a bit dubious in that regard-- to see how such things can be exploited for benefit and it's a tremendous span--so many industries are trying to be web savvy and latching onto things like likes and views, and favourites--but all of these are as demonstrated in this post are fairly easily exploitable.

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