Buying big numbers: Users’ experiences with purchased followers, views, and likes

Abstract This paper investigates how discourses surrounding the purchase of followers are constructed and how they shape social legitimacy within platform-mediated public spheres. Purchased engagement metrics are conceptualized as elements of a sociotechnical dispositif embedded in data-driven power dynamics and market logics. Drawing on Keller’s (2024) notion of “positional power,” the study shows that buying followers, views, and likes has become an ordinary visibility practice through which users navigate algorithmic uncertainty. Based on an analysis of 1,424 Trustpilot reviews, the findings demonstrate how users negotiate legitimacy through recurring discursive markers such as “reliability,” “stability,” “fraud,” and “bots,” while simultaneously constructing platforms as powerful watchdogs whose interventions carry tangible real-world consequences. The reviews reveal the emergence of a precarious, hybrid digital self, shaped by fluctuating metrics, recurrent “drops,” and the ongoing need for “refills,” making authenticity a fragile, continuously managed accomplishment. Moreover, the analysis of hierarchies within the framework of positional power uncovers how the reputational economy reproduces global asymmetries, most visibly in the dismissal of “Third-World” followers as socially devalued publics, signaling a post-truth transformation of everyday digital legitimation practices in which visibility is secured not despite instability but through it.