New business owners, aspiring influencers and purveyors of online disinformation looking to go viral on social media can get help from a 152-year-old newspaper in Buffalo, New York.
The Buffalo News has been serving its community with breaking news and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism since December 1873. Now, in the digital era, its website offers tips and tricks about shady, backdoor schemes to “gain algorithm favor” with leading social media companies like Instagram and TikTok.
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The solution to internet fame — or at least something that resembles it? Buy those X likes, TikTok followers and YouTube views — starting at the doorbuster price of $0.01.
“Growing a TikTok account organically takes months,” an article in The Buffalo News said under the headline, “8 Best Sites to Buy TikTok Followers in 2026 (Trusted).” Successful up-and-coming brands with big aspirations but little time, the article noted, can boost their online presence through paid services called social media marketing panels.
Within the last few months, a review by Straight Arrow found, advertisements presented as articles about the best SMM panels have made their way to newspaper websites across the country, including a college newspaper in Kansas. The faux articles are rife with images created with artificial intelligence, along with questionable claims about the SMM panels’ efficacy.
“Many creators choose to buy active TikTok followers to build early credibility, support social media growth and strengthen their presence on today’s most competitive social media platforms,” according to the article on The Buffalo News website by Namrata Thakkar, whose online portfolio carries the tagline “authority is engineered.”
The articles risk providing the appearance of legitimacy to the fraudulent platforms, experts told Straight Arrow. The panels rely on architecture from cybercrime, including vast networks of computers compromised by viruses, and can be used to perpetuate phishing schemes and other scams.
“The fact that these are now in mainstream newspapers is a problem,” said cybersecurity researcher Sergio Pastrana, an associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid. “If you read it there, you believe that this is something legit.”
Read all about it in the local newspaper
If pay-per-click schemes are the crack cocaine of social media, SMM panels are the dealers in trench coats. They’re the middlemen between the customers seeking instant results on social media and botnet operators who push the fake engagement that makes its way to people’s social media feeds.
Discussions about the shady platforms have long been relegated to illicit marketplaces and shady blogs, Pastrana, whose work focuses on criminal networks on social media, told Straight Arrow. That the services are now being advertised on mainstream local news websites, he said, represents “a new wave for promoting these services.”
The articles touting SMM panels have appeared in at least three local news outlets owned by Iowa-based media conglomerate Lee Enterprises: The Buffalo News, the Billings Gazette in Montana and the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
The articles make bold claims about the panels’ authenticity and results, including that the featured services were vetted through “real user feedback, service reliability and safety measures,” without providing supporting evidence.
Though the articles closely resemble news articles on the outlets’ websites, they’re actually a type of digital advertisement called sponsored content, where brands pay publishers to run articles, videos or other forms of media to promote products.
Also known as native advertising, sponsored content “commonly consists of a headline, often combined with a thumbnail image and a short description, which, if clicked or tapped, leads to additional advertising content,” according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Federal laws prohibit deceptive practices and “advertisers are responsible for ensuring that native ads are identifiable as advertising before consumers arrive at the main advertising page,” according to the FTC. Numerous reports have documented, however, that people often struggle to distinguish native ads from news content.
The article in The Buffalo News calls the advertisement “partner content,” and carries the byline “provided content by Namrata Thakkar.” While the article doesn’t specifically state that the content is an advertisement, it carries a disclaimer. The Buffalo News, it notes, “does not endorse or evaluate the products, services or companies, nor any of the claims made within this contributor content.”
Tracy Rouch, the communications director for Lee Enterprises, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper company, declined to comment.
Thakkar wrote in an email to Straight Arrow that she provides “media placement” and “content distribution services on behalf of third-party clients.”
“We do not participate in phone interviews or discuss specific client campaigns, historical placements or internal distribution process,” Thakkar wrote. The response to Straight Arrow was likely AI-generated, according to detection tools Pangram and GPTZero.
In an article that appeared in the Billings Gazette, Thakkar wrote that FollowerPanel had built “a reputation for being the best SMM panel for Instagram,” while JustAnotherPanel was “arguably the best SMM panel for TikTok.”
“Prices start as low as $0.01 per 1,000 for services like Instagram followers, making it one of the more affordable options on this list,” according to the article. “Getting started is as easy as creating a new account, adding funds and creating an order.”
Friends — for a fee
People have been buying social media followers and engagement for years. It has created embarrassing situations for celebrities, presidents and journalists who’ve been called out for buying fraudulent online clout. In 2012, CBS News called fake social media followers “the newest campaign scandal.”
But that hasn’t stopped people from using the shady services and, in the influencer economy, buying engagement is now mainstream.
These days, “the entire internet is fake,” Renee DiResta, a researcher focused on digital influence operations, told Straight Arrow. And SMM panels powered by bot farms give people an easy way, she said, to “fake it till you make it.”
“If you can get a ton of short-term engagement on a post from accounts that seem real, you can potentially trick an algorithm into pushing your stuff out to more real people,” said DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.”
While SMM panel operators use AI-generated videos to advertise their services on YouTube, they’re openly discussed on Reddit as a way to drive early marketing wins for brands seeking to boost their online exposure.
One Reddit post, from a user who identified as a marketing professional, noted that “algorithms bury pages with no engagement history,” yet new businesses with “brand new social accounts” expect quick results with marketing campaigns. SMM panels can be used, the Reddit user wrote, to “seed initial engagement on new client pages before we layer in the organic content strategy.”
Another Reddit user, who identified as an advertising agency owner, said that “we don’t talk about it publicly” when marketing firms turn to SMM panels to generate faux engagement.
“But yes, a lot of agencies use some form of engagement seeding in the first 30 days,” according to the post. “The key is using it as a bridge, not a crutch.”
‘It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme’
In a 2023 analysis of fake social media engagement services, Pastrana built a detailed catalog of fake social engagement services designed to manipulate platforms’ recommendation algorithms — and then, in some cases, conduct romance scams and other cybercrime against its users.
A majority of the activity, he observed, played out on illicit marketplaces like Hack Forums. One listing from March advertised an SMM panel that helps “skyrocket your online presence,” with followers “straight from the supplier.” One Hack Forums commenter asked whether the SMM panel offered real Snapchat followers and if using the service would prompt a ban from the social media platform. Another commenter said their order was “processed within 10 mins,” and that the service “works good imo.”
Beyond social media engagement, Pastrana noted the panels are also used to generate fraudulent product reviews on online marketplaces like Amazon and to push spamming campaigns on Facebook.
While prices varied widely among panels, Pastrana found the services were cheap and abundant.
On YouTube, people offer step-by-step guides on getting into the pay-for-click business, with one video offering lessons on how to “Build Your SMM Panel in Just Days!” Through layers of resellers that allow people to easily build their own websites, DiResta said, their operators have built a “sprawling network” of fraudsters.
It’s difficult for platforms to stop them, she said, because “as one panel gets taken down or its accounts get booted, another one can spring up.”
“It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme,” DiResta said. “The entire ecosystem is just layers of bulls—.”
That hasn’t stopped The Buffalo News and other legacy publishers from pushing it on their readers.
The article on the “8 Best Sites to Buy TikTok Followers,” acknowledges that SMM panels are flooded with “bot followers.” But the best-of-the-best, it claims, offer “real accounts with verified identities.”
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