Welcome to Botnet, Where Everyone’s an Influencer

Recently, Billy Chasen started to wonder what it would be like to be famous on the internet. Chasen is far from a nobody: He helped create Chartbeat, an analytics service used by many journalists, and Turntable.fm, a beloved internet music community. But compared to the influencer set or even the average high school student, his social media presence is piddling. He has fewer than 600 followers on Instagram, and just over 4,000 on Twitter.

Cultivating a massive online following can take a lot of work, however, and Chasen did not have the time. So instead, he built some bots. Hundreds of thousands of them.

Chasen’s bots now live on a faux-social network called Botnet, which is free for anyone to download as an app. Botnet looks like a stripped-down Facebook Newsfeed, where the only posts you can see are your own. It’s just you and the bots, who like and comment on your posts with reckless abandon.

Botnet is designed to simulate the experience of mega-fame on the internet, Chasen told me—not just a microcelebrity or nano-influencer, but someone on the order of Kylie Jenner or Cristiano Ronaldo. Every post on Botnet receives hundreds of thousands of likes, no matter how banal the subject matter. And they are, almost exclusively, kind and congratulatory. Most celebrities, Chasen says, “don’t know the difference if they’re real people or bots. It’s just a lot of interaction.”