Can you buy fame? Journalist Nick Bilton explores this question in the form of buying three people fake Instagram followers and fake likes in his new experimental documentary "Fake Famous," now streaming on HBO Max. Bilton opens up about how the experiment led him to a bleak outlook on social media.

"The whole concept from the bottom to the top is to make you feel bad and for you to want to buy these things that this influence gets for free so that you can live the life that they live," Bilton tells Salon. "In reality, as we show in the film, their life is really just a lie. It's not real."