Can anyone explain the really weird activity on my friend's Instagram account?
Long story short, my friend has 1100 followers and usually gets anywhere from 20-60 likes on every post. Today he posts a photo, and randomly gets 700 - there was nothing special about it, nor his hashtags.
It gets weirder - some of his other photos start getting likes in the hundreds and his notifications start blowing up. The thing is, it's not like every picture had a bunch of likes, random pictures would get a few hundred and the posts next to them would still be stuck at 30-40. Posts from 55 weeks back are being liked by hundreds of people.
What's throwing us off is that there's no pattern. We have no theories to explain why hundreds of people would like the same photo from over a year ago and not the posts before or after it.
Has this happened to anyone else? He doesnt want his account posted right now but if it'll really help I might later on. I know how trivial it seems but the patterns are just mind-boggling, and I'd love to find out what's happening.
Posted Apr 9, 2015, 5:40 AM UTC
I don't use Instagram, but it seems clear that someone has posted the picture on Facebook or Reddit or something, and that explains the sudden likes. Some of those people look at other pictures, like them, and then repost those.
Although it could be some sort of Illuminati conspiracy. Or aliens. Or both.
That's what I was thinking, but what I forgot to mention was that there were absolutely zero comments. Which is weird because if this was posted somewhere, someone would be saying something. It's also completely random in regard to the other liked photos - a post from 55 weeks back and one from 2 weeks back are both getting 500+ likes while a post from 1 week or 1 month back are getting none.
I'm actually super confused
My guess is that someone is making a robot to sell likes on Instagram and your friends account was randomly selected to be either a test account or is one of many accounts selected to get random likes once in a while to help the robots look natural.
If a real group of people were doing this as a joke or similar, someone would comment. Do the accounts that do this look real? Do they themselves post real photos?
Based on what we've seen, the majority of them seem to be real enough, but have following/follower numbers that are a little strange. They're all people though as far as I can tell
Sounds like a bunch of compromised Instagram accounts are being used en masse to like spam posts. A pseudo-botnet of sorts that is, mentioned previously, being tested on your friend.
What do you mean that their following/follower numbers are strange? Could you link to one of those accounts at least?
most likely the case. It is a bot that simulates the behavior of real accounts, in order to trick the security measures. If I am not mistaken last year or so instragram purged
hundredsmilions of fake accountsSo probably spammers got better at it in order to avoid purges like this. The more account behaves like a human, harder to detect as spam, or as said bellow a semi bot-net of some kind.
There are apps on the App Store that give you coins if you like others pictures and then you can redeem the coins for likes on yours.