Abstract

Nowadays, internet users spend much of their time on social networks, where they share and generate content, support the causes and activities they like, get in touch with their peers, and generate audio-visual content. Besides, they also share their opinions with other users, thus producing User-Generated Content (UGC). The authors noted that UGC lacks proven scientific, professional, or academic quality. However, when content is generated massively in social networks, it can get viral and achieve the most significant engagement of users in the community. Furthermore, there is evidence that the content with the most significant impact on other users is the one that achieves the greatest engagement and support. The scientific review analysis indicated that usually, the content that achieves more impact and engagement in social media is related to fake news or published by fake users. In this context, the present study aims to theorize and define the concept of «faker» based on a review of previous studies. Main results show that a «faker» is a user who is not a real person, but pretends to be such. Based on the results of the exploratory analysis, the following 6 types of users classified as fakers were identified and analyzed: conspiranoid (users who share compulsive and self-taught content in which they share minimal details of the theory they support, have powerful firm beliefs, and always find a way to verify their hypotheses); proselytizing (users who try to gain followers by any means and convince other followers to follow them); narcissists (users who base their content on love and attraction to themselves and generate false content that reflects their own image as the main message); creators of chaos (users whose main objective is to generate chaos in social networks and base their arguments and theories on personal, professional, or political relationships among other users to generate conflicts that will increase the chaos within a closed community); satyr humor (users who generate content focused on the satire targeting public, mythological, ideological, or other characters or entities and defame others by focusing on the actions of public characters); paranoid tyrants (users who focus on the analysis of the information overload, which makes it difficult to interpret the contents on the Internet today). In the frame of this paper, the authors provided a discussion of important theoretical and practical implications of obtained results for the marketing industry and digital marketing in social media.

Keywords: faker, fake content, social media, social network, UGC.

JEL Classification: O1, M31, M37.

Cite as: Saura, J. R., & Punzon, J. G (2020). Defining the types of «fakers» in social media. Marketing and Management of Innovations, 4, 231-236. https://doi.org/10.21272/mmi.2020.4-18

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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