I have in the past been a very casual user of Instagram focusing most of my social network posts on Facebook. I have decided to give Instagram a more focused trial. So far, I am very confused.

Confusion #1: as soon as I post a picture, dozens of followers “like” the picture. There is no way they even had a chance to pull the picture up and see it in that amount of time. I have been a software developer for decades and have focused most of my programming in the last 5 years on SPIDER BOTS. Whats is that you say? Well - automated routines to touch web sites and do things. GOOGLE does this so they know where all the content exists. Clearly there are dozens if not thousands of Instagram BOTS out there. Not real people, just fake account acting like they have looked at your photo and liked it. I am also sure they also can and do automate actual written comments like - “beautiful, nice, great shot, I love your site….”

Confusion #2: How is it when that dozens of people add me as a “follow”. I see it happening on line. While they are adding my follower count is going down. How can 15 new people follow me in 10 minutes and 30 people stop following me in the same period of time. ---- FAKE stuff happening out there.

Beware: Be careful if you are lured into buying Instagram followers.

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/millions-of-fake-instagram-users-disappear-in-purge/

https://boostlikes.com/blog/2016/09/check-instagram-followers-fake