Celebrities exploiting data to boost social media popularity in China

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01:28

Celebrities are boosting their own image by buying millions of "likes" and "shares" on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

One user had more than 100 million "shared" and "liked." That's roughly one-third of China's 337 million Weibo users. The number is barely possible.

"The rating is not done by humans, it's done by machines," said Cao Yongshou, head of Beijing's Data Comapny.

Spending 10 yuan or 1.50 dollars, for instance, and you can buy 400 "bot" followers or have your post shared 100 times.

Judging from the number of followers and likes, traffic boosting has become a lucrative market among celebrities.

A cartoon painting showing how the fake data was made. /VCG Photo

Some celebrity agencies even allow fans to organize activities to boost the popularity of their favorite stars.

Back in November last year, Chinese superstar Kris Wu made headlines after his music sales on the U.S. iTunes store aroused suspicion; an investigation was launched into data manipulation.

"Content created by fake audiences are about the same. Most fake audiences go online around midnight, do you think that's normal? If every one of 10,000 fans registered 10 blank accounts, and each account sends 100 messages, that's 10 million messages, but the actual number of people is 10,000," said Cao Yongshou.

In response, Weibo said it was aware of the "abnormally high volume" of shares of some posts and the social media giant is now limiting the number of shares and comments that can be displayed on a Weibo account to one million. They hope this will discourage traffic boosting.