Can You Manufacture An Influencer? HBO’s ‘Fake Famous’ Tries To Find Out

A few years ago, Nick Bilton told his boss at a major magazine that he could create an influencer in 10 minutes. It was a jaded joke, one made after a decade reporting on social media for outlets like The New York Times and Vanity Fair. He once had a starry-eyed view of what these platforms could be. However, over time, Bilton’s opinion of Instagram especially had been diminished, with all of the app’s faux-sheen filters and the counterfeit, formulaic culture it fostered. All you needed, he argued, were some algorithm-friendly pictures and bunches of follower bots bought on the internet. Then, the sponcon would come rolling in.

On February 2, Fake Famous premieres on HBO. It follows three subjects as they aim to achieve Insta-fame despite being, well, normal people. There’s Dominique, an aspiring actor who works at an athleisure store; Wiley, a low-level assistant to a high-powered real estate broker; and Chris, a recent Los Angeles transplant who wanted to get the hell out of Arizona. Each believes that being an influencer will better their lives in some way—it’ll jump-start their career, it’ll make them more popular, it’ll fulfill their destiny to be somebody. “Would you like to be famous?” the producers ask one of the subjects. “I feel like I deserve to,” he replies.

An in-depth project that both examines and lampoons influencer culture—there are detailed statistics about engaged-user rates and a photo shoot at a studio set made to look like a private jet—it succeeded in its goal of creating one giveaway-posting, trip-taking, gift-receiving social-media personality. (It takes a few months, however, rather than 10 minutes.) At the same time, it casts a critical eye on an app whose users are, at best, often inauthentic. At worst, they’re straight-up lying.

Below, Vogue talks to Bilton about picking his subjects for Fake Famous, social media and mental health, and those influencers who were posting from Tulum during the pandemic.

You chose three subjects to try to make into influencers: Dominique, Wiley, and Chris. Why did you pick them?

The thing was I didn’t want to pick someone like the basketball player who was already playing for the Harlem Globetrotters or the opera singer who had sung at Carnegie Hall. I wanted to make sure that we were showing that you or I could walk in there and be the people that we would turn into fake influencers.

The three subjects reach varying levels of success when it comes to influencing. So, without giving too much away, what did your subject who did become fake famous do that the other two didn’t?

I think it really came down to what you were willing to do to be perceived as a famous influencer. The one who makes it literally would show up to anything. We would be like, “All right, you’re going to go to Vegas on an influencer road trip, and you have to pretend that you have 180,000 followers,” and they were like, “Great, I’m there.” But for one of our subjects, they didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t their brand. Another had a tremendous amount of anxiety.

Those scenes were tough to watch. Talk to me about what you saw with Instagram and its correlation with mental health.

It really, genuinely affected them. There were a lot of moments that we didn’t film because we didn’t want to make it feel like a reality-TV show. They were really struggling with it. When you look at the numbers, the rise of teen suicide and teen depression, the rise of bullying—the graphs all concurrently happen with the rise of social media. There’s no question that they are tied into each other.

Baratunde Thurston [an activist who serves as one of Fake Famous’s talking heads] puts it so eloquently when he says, “We keep children away from cigarettes because of the harm. But in this realm, we’ve left them to the wolves.”

You have kids yourself. How do you plan to help them navigate social media?

We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Yesterday morning he says to me, “Dad, can I have a cell phone? My friend has one.” I was like, “Your friend—who is also five— has a cell phone?” It was true. I checked, and the friend does have a cell phone. You realize how little kids are just sponges for everything. Everything they see, everything they hear, every action they watch. I’m not waiting until my kids are 12 years old to teach them that social media and YouTube can have a really negative effect on them. I’m teaching them now.

One of things you talk a lot about in this documentary are bots. There’s a harmless side—when, say, someone buys them to look cooler than they actually are on Instagram. But they can also be a very dark force.

There’s true evil to what they can be used for. All the way back in 2010, I was covering Twitter for the Times. People were using Twitter in Iran to organize the election protests. But at the same time, the Iranian government was developing bots that were telling people to go to certain places so that they could arrest them. Then we saw it with Trump. There was a lot of very fake engagement on the platform that worked to his advantage.

Originally, all these subjects said they wanted to be Instagram famous. But when they started having to deal with these followers and be a public persona, it wasn’t what they wanted at all.

People look at fame as this fast track to this wonderful life, right? They see these famous people who look like they have this incredible lifestyle. They’re on vacation all the time. They never work. They’re at the beach. They have great bodies. They get all this free stuff. I think what we tried to show in the film is that it’s all just bullshit. It’s not real.

When we followed that brand-sponsored influencer road trip—some of the women hated it. They were on a bus in the cold getting changed in the desert. The food was terrible. But none of them posted that because that would mean they wouldn’t get invited to the next thing. I mean, tell me a time that you’ve seen an influencer talk about some free thing they got that they didn’t like. That’s never going to happen.

Do you think the pandemic has changed influencing, or do you think that once this is all over people are going to be right back to it?

I think that it changed it for a minute. You had people who were still posting bikini photos from Tulum during lockdown. Then they quickly had to stop because they looked like total fools. But they’re back on vacation again. They don’t care. They’re back taking advantage of these companies and hotels. They’re also posting as if nothing is going on. I think that people are realizing more and more what is authentic and what is not. These people that post, “Oh, my God, check out my new mattress,” or “Check out this vacation I’m on”—that lifestyle I just can’t see continuing for too much longer. Now, I don’t think influencer culture is all bad. There are people who address really important issues or those who are doing interior design or cooking classes—things that are helpful to others. But I think that’s only like 5% of them.

There was once so much hope for what social media could do for the world—I’m thinking back to the Arab Spring. Is there any way we could get back there? We saw with Black Lives Matter how social media helped amplify that movement.

Social media does have a great aspect—yes, it can help organize and spread the word. But I personally believe that it’s more technology than social media that’s doing that. You can organize protests through messaging platforms. And in the 1960s, buses of people were [taken] to Washington D.C.—they didn’t need a tweet or a post to tell them. It does, however, change what the media covers. Reporters are sitting on their phones and computers, and they see the things that everyone is talking about. Then, they want to write about them.

So, is Instagram influencing a bubble that’s about to pop?

During filming, I was following all these influencers. I wanted to understand how to emulate the stuff they were doing so we could fake it later on. They were on vacations and had their free coffee machines. There were the van-life people, who live and travel around the world. One day, after work, I was bummed out. My wife asked me what was wrong. I said to her, “I feel like we just don’t do anything and we should rent a van.” She replied, “Do you realize you’re feeling this way because you’re following all these influencers and they’re making you feel awful about your life?”

It was a holy-shit moment. I’m a reporter. I’ve written about tech for years. I’m doing this documentary, and it’s even working on me. I quickly unfollowed them after that. My hope is that the same thing happens for other people—that they have this realization that following these influencers does not make them feel better. It does not make their life better. In fact, it does the complete opposite. I think that that’s one way the bubble gets popped.

You’ve covered Instagram and other social-media companies since the beginning. How has it changed since its founding in 2010?

Back then, I was at the forefront of [theorizing] on what was going to happen on these platforms and their growth. Now, I actually believe that we’re at the forefront of the demise of them. I do not believe that in 20 years people will be posting on Instagram or Twitter. I think that there will be something else that has replaced them or a generation that doesn’t use it anymore.

The reality is…the social experiment of social media? It hasn’t worked out.