Post onto social media and you open yourself up to every form of low life you can imagine. We all know that and yet we continue to use these channels despite the grief they can invariably cause us.

But I have a specific gripe with social media that all creatives and artists will recognise. This particular disease affects all the social media channels but, in my experience, especially Instagram. Try uploading a link to a new song and you’ll immediately get bombarded by muppets who want you to spend money promoting the song on their account.

Despite the fact that this goes against the rules of channels like Instagram they crawl out of the woodwork in their droves every time I post using any sort of music related hashtag. I’ve reported literally hundreds of accounts and blocked each one and yet there’s always more. They are like cockroaches, you can’t kill them and they’ll survive a nuclear holocaust.

As I say I find Instagram the worst but Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn all have these fake accounts willing to part you from your money to promote your music to their imaginary followers. The accounts are bogus, their worth is nil and yet the social media channels allow them free access and do nothing to prevent them spreading their spam.

If social media channels got rid of fake and bogus accounts they would loose millions of subscribers but meanwhile they allow these parasites to infest their platforms and pester genuine posters. They add nothing to the platforms, they break the rules, they are never sanctioned and they are never removed simply because the platform owners couldn’t care less.

And yet some idiots will pay $44 billion to own a platform chock full of bogus accounts and financial traders value companies like Meta in the $ billions when they have just as many, if not more, bogus accounts.

I will continue to report them and to block them, for all the good it will do me, or you.