Why would someone want to sell (or buy) a social media account, like a Discord or Twitch account, for example?
In: 4
Because the activities such accounts can partake in can be valuable. Any capability can be a weapon given a context.
They can be used for:
– engagement manipulation (views, watchtimes, likes/votes/shares)
– assessment manipulation (votes again, but also stars, ratings, emotion responses (see FB), etc)
– mass abuse (mass flagging/reporting), flooding, malicious advertising
– people manipulation: sowing dissent, posting propaganda, etc.
– circumventing bans/blocks
The more real looking account the higher the price, as it will be that much harder for both automated systems and human moderators to identify fakes.
Note that even if you were able to constrain accounts 1:1 per individual, these kinds of abuse wouldn’t disappear necessarily, it would be just harder and more expensive to scale.
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