What if social media likes, follows and subscribers didn’t reflect a person or thing’s popularity, but their budget?
As NHSEB case 6 exposes, social media endorsements can easily be bought online. The motive is simple: the more Twitter followers, Facebook likes and YouTube subscribers, the more credible, trustworthy and cool a person, cause, party, or product appears to be. Nothing succeeds like success, and so it’s much easier to add followers when it appears that you already have followers.
However, paid social media endorsements dilute the value of all social media endorsements. We can see this, and why the practice might be unethical, by analyzing it from the perspective of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
Kant’s CI sounds fancy (and kinda is), but can be simplified into two basic rules:
- Only do stuff you could rationally endorse everyone else doing in similar circumstances
- Always treat persons with respect, and never as mere tools
In applying rule #1, also known as Kant’s universalizability test, consider what the result would be if everyone paid people and bots to follow them and like their posts. If everyone did this, then the number of followers, likes or subscribers an account enjoyed would cease to impress.
Having 100k+ YouTube subscribers is only a good indicator that the channel is of high quality (or at least adds value for many people) because we assume the numbers represent actual humans who genuinely endorse and enjoy the videos released there. However, if everyone always paid for YouTube followers, we’d realize a channel’s subscriber count is not an indicator of its quality, and would have to find some other way to decide whether to invest the time to sample its content.
The same would be true for Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and all social media platforms – followers, likes, subscribers etc. are only impressive because we assume they reflect actual popularity among actual non-paid humans.
Using Kant’s ethics to consider the implications of universalizing the purchase of social media popularity clarifies why doing so would undermine the intent of those who currently do it. When people buy likes, they want to come off as more popular than they actually are. But since they couldn’t endorse everyone doing this (for if everyone did it, they’d get no benefit by doing it themselves), social media influence buying can’t pass Kant’s universalizability test, and is therefore unethical, at least from the perspective of Kantian Ethics. Analyses from other ethical angles may generate a different result.
And by the way, for an ethics video or two, check out my YouTube channel, YouTube.com/MattDeatonPhD. As far as I know, all 338 subscribers are actual unpaid humans 🙂