Social media star

Couple of months ago I received an offer to work as a freelancer from a popular crowd sourcing platform. This platform was going to provide pay as per the tasks completed. I did not have any restrictions towards working hours. Whichever tasks I would complete I would get paid for them. I liked the profile and hence I decided to join that platform.

I enjoyed the task based work. Tasks were short and the payments would be received at soon as the task would get completed. I was happy with the work I was getting because I was placed into the research and testing part of the platform. Being from a research background it felt like I had much more freedom towards research than I had at my corporate job. This work felt more fulfilling and liberating.

I completed my first month into this type of work. I had been receiving good payouts as per the task that I had been completing. One day I received an upgrade over the platform. This upgrade was towards the upgrade for wider work. In addition to research and testing I would also be receiving the work towards social media activities. I did not have any experience from social media management yet I decided to consider this as a new learning opportunity. I decided to start working on to the social media activities through the platform.

I opened the social media activity worklist from my profile. I saw the first request of watching a YouTube video and a pay out was assigned for it. I thought it was a harmless task. I opened the video and watch it. It was a useful video of showing how to change the cartridges of the printer. I was surprised to know that why the creator was offering a pay out for viewing the video because it already had over 5 million views. Nonetheless I thought this was a good way of learning.

After that there was another task on the work list to follow an influencer. I was bit skeptical about this task because on social media platform I only follow the people or organisations I truly admire. I do not prefer to follow the people or companies with whom I do not share my values. Still out of curiosity I opened the webpage of the influencer. Looking at the web page I decided not to follow that influencer and decided to skip the task.

After completion of a week of social media activity one day I received an email from the platform. They wanted my feedback over a video conferencing call towards the social media activities. When I joined the call I realised that the creative team of the platform was present to seek the feedback. They asked me that why I chose not to engage with some of the social media tasks. I explained them my reason that I engage only with the post which were fitting my value.

The creative team told me that the influencers are paying high amount to the platform so that they can buy subscribers and views for their respective channel and this is how the tasks were created. I was completely shocked to hear this information. Everything started becoming clear to me. I always used to wonder how the creators get millions of subscribers and views and now I had the answer to that question.

After knowing the truth I told the platform to revoke my social media activity tasks and assign me only for the research and training task. Somehow social media tasks did not fit my moral and hence I was happy to opt out of that activity.