Slashdot Mirror
The Underground Economy of Social Networks
An anonymous reader writes "In a new study, Barracuda Labs analyzed a random sampling of more than 70,000 fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers. They also analyzed some of the people that are using such fake followers including the recent example of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Twitter account. Between Facebook's 10-Q filing stating that 83 million of its accounts are fake, to Mitt Romney's Twitter account recently falling under scrutiny for suspicious followings, fake social network profiles are a hot topic at the moment. And these fake profiles are at the center of a very vibrant and growing underground economy. This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity."
How many fake accounts will it take to prop up Farcebook after they've forced Timelines on people and they begin the mass exodus to Google+
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Bulk shills are. Welcome to the future, where the difference between a valid viewpoint and an astroturfed attempt to hornswaggle you out of your own money and political power has shrunk to the imperceptible.
Whereas I previously liked all of Mitt Romney's policies and was going to vote for me, this shocking revelation that his Twitter follower count might be manipulated is just too much for me to swallow, so he loses my vote!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I would have phrased this differently:
This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and abusers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity, sell advertising based on their now large social audience or conduct other malicious activity."
We could probably go with something like this:
This underground economy consists of dealers who create and sell the use of thousands of fake social accounts, and suckers who buy follows or likes from these fake accounts to boost their perceived popularity while under the misguided impression that these numbers convince people to purchase their product
One "like" from a "friend" is worth a hundred thousand likes from random strangers (even if they're real people). And one detailed comment about a product from an actual trusted friend is worth more than a hundred thousand likes from friends.
fake Twitter accounts that are being used to sell fake Twitter followers
Why use twitter? It sounds more and more like that fight club speech WRT doing work at jobs we hate to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. Is there anyone still using twitter who is not a bot, bot dealer, or PR shill?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
is advertising. It needs to be pretty much removed from modern life. Attracts the slimiest motherfuckers.
there is a perception that anonymous accounts must be stamped out by google, facebook, twitter, etc. wrong approach
in truth, let anonymous accounts blossom by the ten, hundred, or thousandfold
instead, the option should be provided for people to choose one of their accounts to be certified as real, whatever that process may be (the process must be thought out, you can hack anything, but the process must be as foolproof as possible)
people who want real metrics, real voting, real value, real financials, etc., can therefore choose to refrain certian transactions to only certified accounts. then let the bilgewater anonymous drek do as it wants, not affecting those things which the internet holds great promise to do, but is currently held back to due anonymous douchebaggery
ps: of course there are valid uses for anonymity. i don't need to the hear the arguments for anonymity, i understand them. you need to understand i am making a place for anonymity in this scheme of certification, and you also need to understand that there is plenty the internet promises to do (such as voting and certain financial transactions) that anonymity ruins
so the emphasis then becomes on not negative proof: stamping out every anonymous account, which is impossible and a ridiculously huge undertaking. the emphasis becomes one of positive proof: self-chosen inclusiveness and opt-in. for those who choose not to be anonymous, certain new abilities on the internet become possible. for everyone else who chooses to remain anonymous, carry on, status quo unaffected
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you aren't the one holding the gun, then you have no political power.
Pithy; but mostly false. In basically any polity as large/complex or larger than 'barbarian warband' actually holding the gun is a rather entry level task, typically handled by the actual leader's lackies. At the 'barbarian warband' level the strongman might occasionally have to do it himself; but even there it will be his charisma and burly friends and/or non-traitorous-family who keep somebody from just stabbing him in the eye while he sleeps...
If anything, "political" institutions are really an exercise in nothing so much as the mitigation of direct gun handling, through a combination of institutional compliance(ie. they don't say force of law for nothing; but the overwhelming majority of compliance requires zero cops to achieve) and relatively small(and, if one is both competent and lucky, tame) violence specialists to deal with any exceptions to the former.
Our paper from November 2011, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social", covered this last year.
Barracuda Networks doesn't even seem to have published a paper. (The article linked in the Slashdot article is a scraper site for press releases.) The Barracuda press release points to an "infographic" and a blog posting which, as their only outside source, links to a black hat site.
Barracuda doesn't seem to have discovered the extent of the social spamming ecosystem. We identified at least 6 levels:
This structure insulates the legitimate businesses who use ad agencies from the criminal activity at the bottom. Except for the botnet operators, everybody in that ecosystem has some kind of web presence, although towards the bottom, they usually have only Skype and Gmail accounts as contacts. I'm not going to link to them here, but our paper gives actual names.