Why doesn't 'everyone does it' justify buying followers?

The most common defense of buying followers is that everyone is doing it, so it is just the cost of playing. Even where the premise is exaggerated, the logic does not hold — and following it puts you on the wrong side of where this market is going.

Start with the premise. 'Everyone' is doing it far less than the sellers of it would like you to believe, and the serious operators who last are conspicuously the ones who do not. The claim is partly marketing by the people who profit from you believing it.

Now the logic. Even if a practice were common, that says nothing about whether it works or whether it is safe. Plenty of common behaviors are common precisely because they are easy and short-sighted. The relevant question is not how many people do it, but what happens to the ones who do — and what happens is erosion, corrupted metrics, and account risk.

There is also a direction to consider. Platforms, advertisers, and audiences are all getting better at detecting and discounting fake engagement. A tactic on the losing side of that trend is a worse bet every year, no matter how many people are still making it.

The operators worth learning from are not the ones following the crowd into a shrinking shortcut. They are the ones building something real and measurable — start there, with how to choose a tool for your goal.