If every bad thing is a sin, then heaven is far from us.
I just don’t know why I enjoy writing about the sins I would really be guilty soon. My conscience battles my ability to sentence myself to many days of worries because of this betrayal. I know my family will see me as a prodigal son, a son who would expose the secretes of the family to the enemies.
By family I mean fellow bloggers and entertainers who will surely find this article disgusting and to them, the title will be ‘a painted betrayal’ and I am ready to take the blame if I should be found guilty.
I didn’t want to write this piece, but the burden is better freed than carried and tapping the keys of my laptop to write this is something I have not done in a while. My laptop is guilty but I am not.
If every bad thing is a sin, then heaven is far from us. I just wonder how we can survive in a world wrong things are technically right, a world where the wrong things are the right things to be done and sometimes are considered a necessary step that must be taken.
Politicians should just forgive me because they always make a perfect example for my introductions, when they want to win an election which is a game of numbers; they do everything possible to get these numbers. I should have said some of them, but most of them is the right phrase because of what I have seen in this country. Most of them go as far as rigging the elections by fabricating results; sometimes the total of the votes exceeds the number of registered voters. That is called funny rigging.
An email I received recently motivated me into writing this articles, and the title is ‘Why you should buy Twitter followers in Nigeria’, a well created marketing article that could convince any blogger or entertainer to buy Twitter followers.
Going through the history of those that bought twitter followers, I saw that stars like Diddy, who tweets to 8.2 million followers from @iamdiddy, grew his follower count by 185,399 on one day last June. That’s 3,063 percent more than his average daily gain. (Last month he lost 393,665 followers in a single day with no obvious explanation).
In November 2011, Pepsi gained 71,686 followers in a day, and in 2012, United States of America presidential candidate, Mitt Romney was accused of buying followers because his account which had only 700 mentions and 15 retweets was gaining thousands of followers hourly and an analysis showed that only 26% of Mitt Romney’s 777, 835 followers then were real people.
These are not the only guilty people is this sin that is technically right but almost every famous company and person will answer to that on judgment day, if that will ever appear on the list of questions that day.
I read an article titled ‘How to become internet famous for $68’ and you will not just believe how a man created another man online by buying him 10,000 followers and verifying his account.
It is a simple thing to do and today almost every celebrity is doing it and it will never come as a shocking news because out of about 200 million active users, has as many as 20 million are fake accounts, I simply call them robots.
Even when we know people can buy followers, we still respect people with such status, because they often threaten us with statements like “When I tweet 100,000 people will see it, but when you tweet 1000 people will see it”
The big question is, does these followers click on links?, do they download songs when artistes post their songs online or do they mention their buyer anytime?
The answer is no, because they are just there, they are tools used in winning the game of number.
Upcoming artistes often fall victim of this part because they want to promote with people with high number of followers, a mere trick they will always fall for and most web administrators will lie to the artistes telling them that 20,000 out of their 50,000 followers have downloaded their song. The artistes goes home smiling hoping to hear his song on the streets, but that will never happen because the blogger’s real followers are less than 1000.
I once felt intimidated when I saw the number of followers a friend of mine who is an artiste has and decided to put his followers to test.
I wrote a story about him, and asked him to be the first to tweet the ink. I was hoping to see more than 1000 hits in an hour, but I was so shocked to see that after tweeting the link for two days, we never got more than 200 hits on the article a figure which is too low compared to more than 10,000 accounts that were following him.
High number of followers is what most people want, but as dumb as they are, these followers are just like ornaments; they do nothing but beautify the profile of a user. Making what he might never be.
A fellow blogger once told me that if I want to rub shoulders with the top bloggers in the country, the simple thing to do would be to be buying Twitter followers, Youtube views and Fans followers because they will make my profile look like I get thousands of followers in a day.
He agreed with me that it was wrong, because every dime that would be made from people we would be promoting will surely be on the platform of deceit, yet we saw this wrong thing as the right thing to be done.
Could this be a crime? If this is too heavy can we just call it a sin and know that the only person that will be judging this offence will be God.
Politicians and companies are guilty of this as well as entertainers but one thing we don’t know is this. We are all lying to ourselves.
Politicians use their followers to convince people that they are famous; entertainers use theirs to show their fans that they are known around the globe, while the bloggers use theirs as a reason why artistes should promote with them.
Buying fans or followers on social networking sites will surely become a trend very soon, and when it does, it will not only be an ugly trend, but a funny trend where everyone will be lying to themselves, getting what they want even though the other party is so aware they are lying.
No one has ever been convicted for this, so it is not a crime. Only mere accusations have been put up against politicians mostly but I see this trend make the list of ‘top legitimate deceits in the world’ because it is nothing less than that.
While we call this deceit a trend, I see a day when it will become a crime, probably a day when someone must have earned what is not due to him because he took time to buy thousands of followers. Any day such crime is committed; every country of the world will surely have a guilty person.
Someone’s justification could be that everybody lies, but then we should have in mind that If every bad thing is a sin, then heaven is far from us.
Follow Chinedu Hardy Nwadike on @hardynwa, or via BBM 21F3F44F
