for YouTube, Twitter, etc.) will be used for promotional purposes, controlled by the client, while also raising all the ethical concerns highlighted in the previous example. However, this speculation might actually be optimistic. Fake accounts like these could also be used for more sinister purposes, such as as tools for spreading fake news [@Allcott2017] for political purposes or for committing fraud.

To sum up, it seems justified to state that there is a black market for “fake” accounts and social media activity and that promotion done using this market represents an ethically gray area.

The author wants to point out that this is not to say that microworkers.com or any other platform is in itself immoral or designed to be a black market—such platforms also offer a useful venue for valid projects, like data processing at scale, acquiring subjects for survey-based or interactive online scientific research, monitoring a competitor’s public online activity, or counting objects on images - several such campaigns were observed.

Related Work
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The marketing techniques discussed in this article are related to techniques called sock puppetry and click farming. Sock puppetry means the control of many social media accounts by one person or a small group 