Online popularity manipulation on social media: short-term benefits and long-term costs

Online popularity can be manipulated quite easily as there are firms selling fake social media metrics (followers, views, likes, etc.). They create an opportunity for individuals who can monetize their online popularity. This paper investigates the short- and long-term economic consequences of online popularity manipulation for professional athletes who acquire fake followers. Focusing on soccer, we created a unique dataset of 1,077 international players and took advantage of Twitter's suspicious account removal in July 2018 to proxy fake followers. Empirical explorations show strong ties between Twitter account creation, transfer involving financial negotiation and fake followers. Results show that fake followers significantly impact players' value – i.e. transfer fees – but only if the transfer occurs within six months of the Twitter account creation. In this case, fake followers are associated with an average 5% rise (≈ e450,000) in transfer fees. While boosting online popularity can help a few individuals over the very short-term, the public exposure of possible manipulation creates distrust and harms the overall market. Our results show that a large share of lost followers (> 2%) has a significant and negative impact on transfer fees for transfers occurring soon after the removal of fake followers.