alt Hacker NewsThe vast majority of "likers" have never been real people in any case. All of the prominent accounts are boosted by bots and Mechanical Turk users in economically underdeveloped countries. This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.
Anecdotally, I have been 'liking' (as a verb) posts about 3x more after anonymity went into effect. I used to be anonymous on X until I started meeting people at IRL events and then had to be more cautious about what I broadcast to my network. Anonymized likes gave me back a lot of that freedom.
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> This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.
That seems like dubious methodology. Obviously if a celebrity posts something that's going to get more engagement than some rando, even accounting for the difference in impressions.
Pretty much all of these social media companies have been built on a foundation of fraud. It's understandable why, the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular. It is nonetheless fraud, and the criminal DNA of these companies never goes away.