Social Media Rants

Something that has always irked me on Social Media Platforms are those giveaways that accounts create. When accounts offer to give money to someone who likes and retweets a certain tweet they can have a shot at earning the money. Simple right? Nope, you always have to follow the person doing this “giveaway.” the claim is that if you aren’t following the person doing this event, they will not be able to contact you to deliver your prize. For the most part, this is not accurate. Profiles can request to direct message anybody from twitter, the receiver from the request then chooses to accept or decline this request. In a “giveaway” the sole purpose is for an account to gain a bunch of followers to achieve a twitter famous status. After these events end I have seen a handful of accounts actually change their profiles to a different name, twitter handle, profile pictures, and cover photos. The takeaway from this entire blog is that the majority of giveaway events on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook are not real and result in just spam posts to continue. Think about these as those spam posts that went like “send this picture of a cat playing the piano to 15 other people or have 15 years of bad luck.” The strategy is the same, but the execution is different. Rather than participating in these, just ignore them and let Social Media users like myself just find content that we want to see in our feeds.