The internet's been heading for this fate for a while. Yes, the scale is a lot bigger now (30,000 fake accounts in a network rather than a few hundred), but sim

The internet's been heading for this fate for a while. Yes, the scale is a lot bigger now (30,000 fake accounts in a network rather than a few hundred), but similar things have been common on large forums and online communities since the late 90s or so. People have bought fake traffic, users and comments for that amount of time too. Often en mass with automated systems importing it from third parties like Yahoo Answers. It's just that the commercial social networks are now the main target, and the scale of these operations has gone up accordingly.