Faking being on social media

Many people express the opinion that I am on Facebook a whole lot. I am not. I am only ever on Facebook for the mercenary reason that I wish to persuade people to do things for me for free, which is infrequent.

However, Facebook, business-plan-be-praised, doesn’t want it to look like a void of empty performance of fake-smile social favour vampires, so they do their best to animate the stinking corpse of my Facebook profile, to let it seem that interesting things are happening. So easy to look like you actually log in! Wow! Much peer engagement! Very influencer!

And Twitters; who has time for the Twitters? Presidents and other unsavoury persons! People who manage your “engagement” with their “brand”!

Don’t worry, social media’s woefully dysfunctional profit model means they are incentivised to make it easy for you to pretend to be there. Yes I am totally flirting with you because you are nice not because I want to interfere in elections.

Anyway, you are supposed to be on social media these days, so the important thing is to occasionally water those social media profiles with some sprinkles of content, so that your brand bursts or pops or thrusts or whatever brands do these days.

Firstly, use generic web automation.

There are, in addition, specialised software tools for that, e.g. fbchat enables fake usage of Facebook Messenger, and messenger platform is their official API for creating bots.

• more gray-hat: you can buy automated bots to wrangle facebook/instagram etc for you; specifically, stuff that requires genuine human interaction that is NOT supported by the manufacturers’ APIs. Dropping $200 for that seems like a lot, but it would hypothetically save more than a few hours’ coding if that were your thing. It would also have limited consumer protections and an unusually high likelihood of malware.
• There is of course an API for content posting which one could hypothetically legally access; it is only for megacorporations though.

There are some good tips in karicoss’s post on data liberation which could be used to do more malevolent things than they suggest.

Or why not fake social media itself? Binky is a deeply sarcastic app that makes a fake social network talking to itself about nothing. You can have this over-explained for you by Ian Bogost:

Binky offers all the pleasure of tapping, scrolling, liking, and commenting without any of the burden of meaning.

Just want to automate those messaging apps? As mentioned in my secure chat notebook, Matterbridge is a

bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocket.chat, steam, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix and more with REST API (mattermost not required!)

Even allows, e.g. bridging facebook messenger to a real app.