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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the purchase of followers, likes, and views as an everyday practice of navigating extractive data infrastructures. Drawing on 1,424 reviews, it shows how users manage legitimacy, visibility, and agency within metric regimes that produce them as ‘data beings’.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how platform users engage with data extraction infrastructures through the everyday practice of purchasing followers, views, and likes. Rather than treating fake engagement as mere deception, the study conceptualises it as a sociotechnical intermediary embedded in extractive visibility infrastructures and data-driven regimes of knowledge and governance. Drawing on Keller’s (2024) notion of positional power, it shows how buying engagement has become a pragmatic strategy for navigating algorithmic uncertainty in platform-mediated public spheres.

Based on an analysis of 1,424 Trustpilot reviews, the findings demonstrate how users negotiate legitimacy and agency within infrastructures that frame metrics as unavoidable indicators of value. Recurring discursive markers such as “reliability”, “stability”, “fraud”, and “bots” articulate users’ situated knowledge of platform control, while simultaneously constructing platforms as powerful watchdogs whose interventions carry tangible social and economic consequences. Drawing on infrastructure studies (Star & Ruhleder) and platform governance research (Gillespie), this paper conceptualises purchased engagement as a form of infrastructural repair within extractive visibility regimes.

The reviews further reveal the emergence of a precarious digital self shaped by fluctuating metrics, recurrent “drops”, and the ongoing need for “refills”, making authenticity a fragile, continuously managed accomplishment. The analysis also shows how datafication reproduces global hierarchies, most visibly in the devaluation of “Third World” followers as illegitimate publics.

The proliferation of purchased engagement highlights how data infrastructures compel users to participate in the stabilisation and manipulation of metric regimes, contributing to STS debates on data knowledge, governance, and resistance to becoming ‘data beings’.