When I was still in art school, not every teacher liked my work. (Which of course is very normal.) However, some of those teachers admitted they didn’t like my work in general because they believed it was too ‘weird’ or ‘different’ from ‘normal’ art and because of that no one would really like it, so therefore they didn’t like it. I then decided to pull a little prank vs. experiment on them.
Via eBay I purchased a thousand fake Facebook likes, fake computergenerated profiles that would like my Facebook page. This practice is very common and widespread among celebrities and companies in order to look more popular. It’s also very affordable. During one of the exams I spread out large, silver letters on the floor, plainly showing “1234 people like this” (the exact amount of likes my page had at that time). Interestingly enough, the general opinion of the critical teachers shifted and became more in favor of my work. I decided to keep the fake likes and eventually purchased 500 more.
Up to this day the results have been very surprising. I get lots of compliments on the amount of likes my Facebook page has, although lots of people know a part of those likes are fake. People view my work as more important, being influenced by the number of my followers.
Also the amount of people that start liking my page went up a lot. Every now and then Facebook removes fake profiles and my like-count drops by the tens of hundreds, but soon enough that loss will be gone by the new people who like my page. Facebook now even promotes my page on others’ accounts because of the amount of followers. Because of this, the fake profiles are now slowly getting replaced by actual followers.
At the time, no one (including me) knew the exact amount of real followers I had on my page.
Currently, the page has been unlisted.
