“Telegram is widely used for influence operations, particularly by state actors such as Russia, who invested heavily in information warfare on the channel.” WhatsApp and Telegram are among platforms with consistently expensive fake accounts, averaging $1.02 and $0.89 respectively.

...

Small vendors resell and broker existing accounts, or manually create and “farm” accounts. The larger players will provide a one-stop shop and offer bulk order services for follower numbers or fake accounts, and even have customer support.

A 2022 study co-authored by Dek showed that around ten Euros on average (just over ten US dollars) can buy some 90,000 fake views or 200 fake comments for a typical social media post.

I'm glad that the fediverse is mostly humans and not corpo-bots, but I think this is mostly because it's not popular enough to be a target yet.

We have manual sign-ups and instance-level blocking, but I wonder if that would be enough if the botters really decide they want a piece of us.