So you’re going to tell me that 140 million people are famous? The whole thing is such bullshit and everyone buys into it.” “The most astounding number to me was that 140 million people on Instagram had over 100,000 followers and 40 million have over 1 million followers. “The reality of what all of this is, is that every single, solitary person on Instagram has fake followers, whether they bought them or they didn’t, because bots make up half of the engagement on the platform,” Bilton says. Still, Bilton, who has been covering the tech world for two decades and started his own bot farm a few years back, finds that both the diversity in the story he ended up telling, and the organic nature to how he got there, is what works best about his exposé into the pervasiveness of the false sense of fame being perpetuated on social media.
Fake famous movie#
“The original ending of the movie was going to be that we were going to try to get one of them to 1 million followers and have a million-follower party at the Chateau Marmont, have it sponsored by a bunch of brands, have a bunch of celebrities show up thinking they were coming to a celebrity influencer party,” Bilton tells Variety. The COVID-19 pandemic hitting in the middle of production was another curveball that altered the structure of the film. “Peeling back the layers to reveal what’s really happening behind the scenes of influencer fame, Fake Famous illuminates our obsession with the numbers of likes, followers, and favorites we get, and how most of our online world is much more fabricated than we realize.Actor Dominique Druckman “would do anything we asked of her,” Bilton says, but fashion designer Chris Bailey rejected the use of bots, and former real estate agent-turned-psychology student Wylie Heiner worried about being called out for his fakeness and set his account to private at one point in the middle of shooting. Even if the entire premise is tenuously based on fake scenarios and fake lives, the financial incentives for every piece of the puzzle are real,” HBO added.
Fake famous free#
“Emerging influencers get approached by companies offering them free goods, and the most successful of them are paid fortunes to advertise on their platform. By purchasing fake followers and an army of bots to ‘engage’ with their social media, the newly made ‘influencers’ discover both the wonders and costs of this unlikely, immersive lifestyle,” HBO Max said of Fake Famous.Īs seen in the trailer, the phony influencers’ social media following is manipulated by an army of bots, with Instagram-eager brands ultimately flooding them with free stuff.
The film’s journey into this world is driven by the casting of three people in Los Angeles who all have relatively small social followings and the attempt to grow them into famous influencers. The film, by first-time director Nick Bilton, “explores the industry of social media influencers through an innovative social experiment. Three normal people pretend their way to social media stardom in the trailer for the documentary Fake Famous, coming to HBO on February 2nd.