This is the Big Tech polemic that wasn't supposed to be written. Tim O'Hearn is a lovable rogue who spent his early twenties gaining millions of followers for his clients while fighting anti-botting measures on social networks. After losing the battle, he engineered addictive technology systems at a social media startup that eventually imploded.
Framed isn’t a research project. It’s a first-person account of growing up with the internet, learning how to program, and earning money from the dark side of social media. It fondly recalls early Web 2.0 and reintroduces a forgotten practice from Myspace that laid the groundwork for modern fame seeking. It analyzes the tangled ecosystem of businesses dependent on social media platforms and the mystifying exercises of software companies setting rules and actually enforcing them.
The book pushes opinions on today’s hottest topics: influencers, verification, algorithms, filter bubbles, botnets, screen addiction, fake love, spam, shadowbans, black hat marketing, deplatforming, journalism and “news” feeds, the dead internet theory, video game cheating, and why people are still buying fake followers.
And–getting banned. Read Framed while you still can.
This is the Big Tech polemic that wasn't supposed to be written. Tim O'Hearn is a lovable rogue who spent his early twenties gaining millions of followers for his clients while fighting anti-botting measures on social networks. After losing the battle, he engineered addictive technology systems at a social media startup that eventually imploded.
Framed isn’t a research project. It’s a first-person account of growing up with the internet, learning how to program, and earning money from the dark side of social media. It fondly recalls early Web 2.0 and reintroduces a forgotten practice from Myspace that laid the groundwork for modern fame seeking. It analyzes the tangled ecosystem of businesses dependent on social media platforms and the mystifying exercises of software companies setting rules and actually enforcing them.
The book pushes opinions on today’s hottest topics: influencers, verification, algorithms, filter bubbles, botnets, screen addiction, fake love, spam, shadowbans, black hat marketing, deplatforming, journalism and “news” feeds, the dead internet theory, video game cheating, and why people are still buying fake followers.
And–getting banned. Read Framed while you still can.
I bought my first batch of fake followers in 2012.
Around that time, I decided to become a software engineer.
Over the past ten years, my code, methodologies, and business ventures have been responsible for hundreds of millions of illicit automated engagements on Instagram.
I was motivated by currency, curiosity, and clout, and it was easy to justify my duel with the unchecked power of social media platforms. Given all the hours stolen from my generation, why not snatch something back?
I saw how the quirky apps of my adolescence had become inescapably addictive, how Big Tech made a mockery of relationship building, and how algorithms, including algorithms I later developed, rewarded problematic and antisocial behavior. I received declined payment alerts indicating that customers had depleted their bank accounts while chasing popularity on Instagram.
After I started writing this book, a social media startup offered me an opportunity to lead an engineering team that built (controversial) attention-grabbing recommendation and engagement algorithms. I accepted; I was successful. From my control panel, my influence on the platform’s users was godlike. I was stealing their time and getting paid for it.
This book is not a response to the Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma loosely based on the book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, which was itself a narrative-driven amalgamation of viewpoints contained in a half-dozen tech-meets-sociology books with irritably similar titles.
This is not a research project, long-winded whistle-blow, hit piece, or self-aggrandizing chronicle of my life.
Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media is a collection of shards and shreds and conspiratorial diatribes penned by a fellow who grew up with the internet, became an adept programmer, and mastered the realm of social media while never being employed by Big Tech.
Four pillars comprise the impetus of this book:
1. Being born in the 1990s, growing up with the internet, and avidly using social media—from Myspace in 2006 to TikTok in the 2020s.
2. Possessing a computer science degree and a grasp of advanced programming concepts, enabling me to analyze social media on a different plane.
3. Having profited from veritable “bad guy” activities on Instagram and other social media platforms.
4. Having led the development of algorithmic recommendation systems, push notification infrastructure, and personalized social feeds at a mobile app startup.
These experiences, combined with an enthusiasm for writing, enough money to finance and create this book free from outside influences, and a modicum of hope that this effort could be a positive force for change, have led this eccentric recluse on an unlikely journey.
This journey has been a confluence of opportunity and ambition, demand and demarcation, rules and rulers and rulings. I believe I have a duty to preserve my journey. Rigor must be applied even when outcomes may be inconvenient. Questions must be asked, and even the most reckless opinions must be shared despite the risk of ostracization.
I meandered into social media automation because I was motivated by vanity and greed. I made money and brushed shoulders with men and women who earned substantially more. This arena of social media marketing (abbreviated as SMM) turned out to be a shadowy realm of value-added services profitable beyond my wildest imagination. This book covers SMM better than any other.
Much content about social media is biased and misleading—paid placements, mediocre books, recycled content, hidden affiliate links, poor punditry, wonky agendas, and perpetual clickbait point to the concealment of sad truths. Making sense of the deluge of spurious information requires technical adroitness, obsessive immersion, and sociological sensibility. There are few journalists bravely tackling these issues.
The villains and those generating massive revenue from services built on top of social media platforms have no incentive to talk. One scoundrel responded to an interview request with, “I'm good bro, hope the launch goes well.”
Social networks, now synonymous with publicly traded companies, must tread lightly. Shareholders get finicky when faced with publicity about the social media underworld or the societal decay caused by their products. At the same time regulators and authorities are becoming daring. Government action, bot takeovers, and bombshell articles from the New York Times cause users to bounce to other apps. Those precious activity metrics, regularly reported to investors, must be upheld at all costs.
I’ve been the puppeteer as well as the puppet. Unhealthy social media use has weakened the fabric of society. People are depressed, distracted, and anti-social. Placing a smartphone in the hands of a child redefines childhood. The middling creatives among us simply transcribe compelling captions and apply neat filters to their photos.
Framed was written for a broad audience. Although elements of my personal experience are present throughout, there is not a cohesive, linear story. For this reason, I’ve split this document into two themes:
1. Tragicomedy: my views on the amusing, dreadful world of social media.
2. Instagram’s emergence and platform misbehavior: an authoritative account of villainy.
Even if the reader acquires a bootleg copy of this book, perhaps with missing material or unauthorized edits, it’s payment enough to flip through the pages and consider the perspectives therein. Today’s world is filled with unprecedented freedom and opportunity ushered in by the Information Age. Reader, regardless of how or when you came across this book, I hope you share the same optimism that technology can improve society.
I also hope that you’ll follow me back.
Framed is a personal account of growing up with the internet and observing the rise of social media not only as a user, but as an insider who has worked on developing persuasive technology systems in the form of algorithmic recommendations, push notification infrastructure and personalized social feeds - concepts that impact every single smartphone user on a daily basis.
This book is much more than a run-of-the-mill exposé of the dirty underbelly of social media and the shady industry of hacking existing apps to get clients more than what the original app features offer. It is also a careful catalogue of half-forgotten internet history, such as MySpace as the precursor to modern social media and directory sites as the precursor to search engines. A deep dive into this internet history feeds into the central thesis that there was always a precedent for the current state of affairs when it comes to our use and abuse of social media - influencing, clout-chasing, feeling morally neutral about cheating the system, the deep emotions that engagement with our feed can trigger, and above all: the desire to mindlessly scroll our way into oblivion.
The first half of the book lays the groundwork and contextualizes O'Hearn's observations about what social media companies are interested in and how that reflects the way the apps are built.
He shares his views on newsworthiness and the way news is presented and search engines work can skew the truth and impact trustworthiness and muses on screen addiction. There is no one more qualified than a 90s kid to outline a history of going from not knowing where your phone was to our smartphones practically becoming an extension of our bodies. We remember, and we are ready to talk - if only we could unglue our heads from the screens long enough to establish real eye contact. Tim O'Hearn can, and does so with eye-opening honesty and candidness.
Having profited from being a villain and owning his less than savory behavior online, the author is here to tell us why there is a market for the activities he profited from and help us imagine where the whole thing might be going.
The second part of the book dives into Instagram in particular - both the overworld that is currently the playground of 2 billion monthly active users, and the underworld, which is the playground of cunning puppeteers, one of whom used to be none other than our author.
The book is aimed at a general audience, and all the technical jargon is explained in an engaging and easy to follow way. This is the peak behind the curtain that could transform a non-technical user's view of social media. As a fellow 90s kid who likes to boast a slightly higher-than-average understanding of tech and social media, this book both schooled me and made me remember things about the early internet that correlate to the modern state of things in an eerie way that points to the predictability of human psychology and sociology.
The humor is subtle and unobtrusive, but lands every time, with callbacks to previous segments and insightful parallels that support the central thesis.
Successfully blending personal recollections, careful research, internet history, and a basic lesson on how the apps we use every day work, Framed is essential reading for our age. It contains some absolute gems and hard-to-swallow pills about a massive industry that has heavily influenced or at least substantially touched all of our lives, and might just show you how deep the feed really goes.