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...was the author of this article born yesterday? These services has existed for many years, and they involve more than social sites - fake product reviews at sites like Amazon ("positive" for your own product and "negative" for competitor's products) or platform-specific app stores, forum shilling by hardware/software companies (Nvidia/AMD on various hardware forums, Microsoft on forums like WPcentral), political campaigns, etc.

Sure, this sort of thing has been around. But I still find this one interesting in that they're just selling "thumbs up" clicks on social media sites. I guess I'm not surprised... more like amused. Crazy world we live in these days; not long ago, this sort of thing would've been more likely to be a minor plot device in a cyberpunk novel instead of reality.

Eh... People mostly do it for money - social media accounts with high "activity" (likes/friends/readers) naturally attracts advertisers which can offer you to advertise their products. Advertisers do not know if your "activity" is artificial and most of them do not care. Some people also do this for vanity purposes but there's not many of such people...

Monetized social media stuff makes no sense to me either, but social media itself doesn't make much sense so whatever.