Accountability Gaps in the Fake Follower Market
Open accessAbstract
Purchased likes, followers, views, comments, and reviews constitute a professionalised “fake-engagement-as-a-service” market that distorts social proof, skews consumer choice, undermines legitimate advertising, and exposes users to fraud and privacy risks. Despite these effects, the market remains difficult to observe at scale, and responsibility is fragmented across platforms, search engines, intermediaries, and regulators. This paper introduces an empirical mixed-methods framework that renders the fake social activity market observable and auditable. Drawing on 15 expert interviews and forensic analysis of EU-based FAS, we first identify the principal risks and harms associated with this market. We then develop an automated monitoring pipeline that measures (i) discoverability - the prominence of FAS in search engine results across jurisdictions; (ii) market structure - the services offered, pricing strategies, and operational features; and (iii) the cross-border ecosystem - the degree of provider overlap across countries as an indicator of market integration. Finally, we assess how the Digital Services Act (DSA) can be operationalised to address these risks. Across two scans of 24 countries covering 30,000 search results, we identify more than 2,000 FAS and show that fake engagement services remain readily accessible via major search engines, with marked regional variation. We observe substantial price dispersion, extensive reliance on mainstream payment processors, and cross-border clustering shaped by linguistic and cultural similarity. While many downstream harms fall within existing regulatory frameworks, legal obligations remain unclear, producing an accountability gap that the DSA has the capacity but not yet the guidance to address.
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- Authors
- Kalameyets, M., Owens, R., Hammouchi, H., Sergeeva, A., Hoehn, S., Jalilzade, E., Wang, J., Patel, S., Aidinlis, S., Farrand, B., Lenzini, G., & Shi, L.
- Affiliations
- Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
- Durham University (GB)
- University of Luxembourg (LU)
- University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
- Newcastle University (GB)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2026-06-25
- Pages
- 5864-5885
- OpenAlex
- W7165667083
- Semantic Scholar
- 875ec1d93c15aec1d430aae199de81dca97dfc11
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 35
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Durham Research Online (Durham University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- European Media and Information Fund (FAMOUS project)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Diverse Legal and Medical Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Keywords
- social media followers, online fraud, Digital Services Act, platform accountability, social validation, consumer choice, price dispersion, payment processors, privacy risks
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