Crap Celebrities Are Pretending to 'Like' Stuff On the Internet for Money

One of the "Like" farmers captured on last night's Dispatches. (Screen grab via)

He’s the third-biggest Russell in showbiz (or fourth, depending on your position on Russell Grant). And he tweets for money. Allegedly.

Russell Kane – that BBC3 comedian who looks a bit like a Poundshop Nick Grimshaw – last night stood accused of being part of a shadowy list of celebrities who punt things to their online fans for cash. A list that reportedly also includes the likes of moral paragon Wayne Rooney and many of the saintly TOWIE cast. Via a "social media PR" company, Kane was asked by a Dispatches sting team to tweet about a watch they’d made-up – one that apparently "told the time twice a day" (still a great gag).

So he did. "Got my horological buzz on looking at this," he wrote, including a link as stipulated. For this, Dispatches’ fake watch company paid the PR company £1,420. About £140 a word, then.

Kane then came up with the best excuse ever as to why he’d misled his 300,000 follower innocents who had been defrauded by his shameless behaviour. He said he’d been a horologist – a watchmaker – for three years, and thus still had a personal interest in trade developments. A quick sweep of the internet doesn’t find any evidence to support this claim. If true, he stands semi-vindicated. If not, I think we should honorarily vindicate him for being so fast on his feet and so brazen in his cheek. It could even be the best gag he’s ever made.

Kane was probably the most caught-out of the lot, firstly because the money he’d been given was at least approaching decent-whack. And secondly because he seemed to have some credibility to lose, whereas, for fellow fake watch lover and C5 weather-girl Sian Welby, the bar was always low. For his comedy to work, you’re required to like and trust Kane. For Sian to read the weather day-in, day-out, the autocue is required to work. That remains unchanged.

In some ways, the show was a damp squib: "Vacuous, money-grabbing celebs in vacuous money-grabbing shocker!" The interesting bit was simply seeing the mechanisms of it going down. We all know sausages exist. We all suspect what’s in them. But few of us have ever seen a pig’s testicles burst inside an industrial grinder. And there’s a certain fascination – an emotional clarity – in that.

Russell Kane. (Screen grab via)

Its key revelation was producing an Excel spreadsheet containing the names of 140 celebrities who’d tweet for money. The list was blanked-out by litigation-shy producers. ITV are already threatening to sue them for "exposing" Corrie stars as paid tweeters. But the list definitely exists. And while celebrity has always been monetisable, there’s something great about this sort of direct, time-sensitive stock-exchange – the value of your tweet going up and down, day by day, depending on whether you got a RT from Stephen Fry or into a spat with Peter Andre.

It seemed almost cruel to see their personal stock brutally summarised like that: "[name blanked], game show presenter, £500"; "[name blanked], comedian, £250". The rates averaged about £500 a tweet. Good money for not much. But still, not exactly "good money". There were plenty who could only hit a lousy £250. What price would you have to pay for a tweet from someone at the bottom of their list? A Michelle McManus (the big one from Pop Idol)? A Pete Bennett (the Tourettes one from Big Brother)? It’d probably be more socially efficient if those sorts just stood at the top of their roads shouting for ten minutes: “For £25, Pete will shout at above 60 decibels. For £30, he will do so while wearing a yellow, high-visibility jacket.”

The other half of the show concerned the bottom-up side of social media. The buying of "Likes", views, fans and tweets from an army of invisible and largely non-existent sourced-crowds. For that, C4‘s Chris Atkins went to the world click-farm capital, Dhaka, Bangladesh, to view the farms of human click-monkeys in their click-basements, click-debasing themselves on ancient PCs for a real rate of 0.001 dollars per "Like". It’s often said that there are more than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. That’s clearly because they can only do a thousand clicks in 24 hours. Which is just lazy, really.

The mechanics of this process are very mechanical. Whereas most processes in the modern world are built to mechanise, this is the opposite: the fact that Facebook have been able to weed out automated scripts has created a massive market for ordinary people with fingers.

The man of 1,000 faces. (Screen grab via)

During the show we met one Bangladeshi man with 1,000 different Facebook accounts: a literal man of a thousand faces. Were we shocked by this? Or were we just intrigued to have our instincts confirmed? And, after a while, what was the point? Sixty thousand likes that don’t lead anywhere isn’t, in the end, much marketing use to anyone except the PR guy who’s fucked up and has to do a Powerpoint to the client. There was a time when the buying of views or "Likes" was endemic in the music biz, and easily game-able MySpace kicked it into over-drive.

In the wake of the Arctic Monkeys, the basic idea that a pop group could come from nowhere with a massive organic online fanbase still seemed a plausible template for success. Hence, there was seldom a week that went by in 2007 where you didn’t receive a press release headed: “Unheard-of Indie Chancers Gain 50,000 Listens of Crap New Single", despite the fact that you never met anyone in the industry who’d ever even clapped ears on its watery gruel. In the end, the fact that it quickly got beyond satire killed all but the most subtle forms of numbers-massaging. But so long as there are crap PRs and naive client pressure, there will always be some.

By now, it would seem many Bangladeshis have been exposed to more wacky "viral videos" made by second-rate ideas merchants than anyone ever should be in their entire lives. And they were forced to "Like" them all. This has undoubtedly built up a massive charge of resentment. There are certain chart grime stars and Mock The Week second-stringers who, should they ever turn up in downtown Dhaka, would be ripped limb from limb by volcanic waves of click-farmers and click-monkeys pouring from their offices into the streets.

Meanwhile, back in the world of "social media" – from which these problems first sprang – the Twitter reaction was understandably mixed.

“Now this is really f'n ridiculous! #dispatches,” said Dorothy S Wolbertkz. On the other hand, Chastity R Sahnift announced “These kinds of assholes! Almost all I'd like can be a great man #Dispatches”. And finally, Lashon W Rousejo weighed in with, “Lol. Caught in the act! #dispatches”.

Wise words. Let us just be thankful that whatever fakery exists online, there is still a real-life public beyond with the good judgment to see through it.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

Previously – An Introduction to Lynton Crosby, David Cameron's Sweary Spin Doctor