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Inside the Real Economy Behind Fake Twitter Followers
colinneagle writes "People continue to pay money for Twitter followers, and, naturally, a deep network of developers and merchants has arisen to feed the market. A Barracuda Labs study found that the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time, sometimes more. Those who can control 20,000 fake accounts and can attract sales of $20 or more — the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18 — stand to earn roughly $800 per day, according to Barracuda Labs. Keep in mind that very little of this work is manual; the dealers could easily control a system of botnets and set up a few software tools to automate much of the process. Using Twitter's API, developers can design programs that collect all the information of a given group of Twitter users, such as, for example, the 800,000 users following Mitt Romney's account. These programs don't necessarily hijack these accounts — they copy the images and text from their profiles and tweets. This pool of information can then be automatically ported into accounts based on an algorithm that automates the registration process on a massive scale."
Well, I'm not the kind to kiss and tell, But I've been seen with Farrah.
I've never been with anything less than a nine, so fine.
I've been on fire with Sally Field, gone fast with a girl named Bo.
But somehow they just don't end up as mine...
It's a death-defying life I lead, I'll take my chances.
I've died for a living in the movies and tv.
But the hardest thing I'll ever do is watch my leading ladies,
Kiss some other guy while I'm bandaging my knee.
I might fall from a tall building, I might roll a brand-new car,
'Cause I'm the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.
I've never spent much time in school, but I taught ladies plenty.
It's true I hire my body out for pay, hey hey!
I've gotten burned over Cheryl Tiegs, blown up over Rachel Welch
But when I wind up in the hay, it's only hay, hey hey!
I might jump an open drawbridge, or Tarzan from a vine,
'Cause I'm the unknown stuntman, that makes Eastwood look so fine.
They'll never make me president, but I got the best first ladies
Someday's I got'em as far as the eye can see - ouee
A morning dove with Jacky Smith, a crash in the night with Cheryl
But in the end they never stay with me
On my fall from the Tower Building, so Burt Reynolds don't get hurt
I might leap the mighty Canyon, so he can kiss and flirt
Well, that smooth talker's kissing my girl - I'm just kissing dirt
Yes, I'm the lonely stuntman, that made a lover out of Burt
Real Twits out there to worry about fake ones.
or you could have said "such as, for example, the 18 million users follow President Obama's account". I doubt there's 18 million people that interested in him.
Is the sole purpose of doing this to make an entity seem more popular on Twitter than they really are? Assuming so, what is the tangible benefit of doing that? Does Mitt Romney win the election if he has more (albiet fake) Twitter followers?
I'm confused. Who in the world gives one flying frak how many Twitter followers someone has much less spending money for fake ones. That's like organizing a speech in a stadium to only fill the seats with stuffed mannequins... then proceeding to do the speech anyway.
Does this sound like a science fiction story? thousands of internet profiles developed by computers using hijacked accounts manipulating the masses for money in a grand Machiavellian scheme
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It's not just Twitter that has issues with paid-for accounts. Many sites do. You can see prices from one large seller here. I work on Gmail signup abuse (amongst other things) and am quite proud of the price of Gmails on there.
I smell a sales pitch coming on. I've seen many of these stories cropping up in the last few days.
Either the collective awareness of the Internet has suddenly focused itself on this problem... or well-paid PR companies are doing their job.
the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time, sometimes more. Those who can control 20,000 fake accounts and can attract sales of $20 or more — the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18 — stand to earn roughly $800 per day,
Throw in some "unlimited" and some "caps" and it sounds like a cellphone confuseopoly plan. Break it down simple for a fool like me... Lets look at the market. Say you're 18 and hired as the "social media director" at your F500 megacorp for $250K/yr and your key performance indicator is gaining 1000 twitter followers per month. That means you'll have to whip out your personal credit card for... What, $18 every month, or $18 for every 1000 PER month, or $20 for 20 kiloaccounts or what?
So... twitter is basically a "service" where fake media personalities have their PR agent write fake posts for fake followers to read, because it makes money, huh?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you were to outsource some specific portions of the process to third world sweatshops, you would still be able to remain profitable under those margins, and do so without having to constantly update your algorithms to defeat the platform's bot detection. Efficiency!
As a side project I built TwitterAudit (which is under a lot of load right now and runs on a 512mb VPS :) to estimate how many followers are real vs how many are fake. It looks at a sample of 5000 followers and about 5 criteria to guess whether a given user is real or fake... check it out!
How exciting.
Stuff that matters. Not any more.
Just like SEO, this is for managers who were given an arbitrary popularity metric to follow rather than being told to create good content people actually wanted to read.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You underestimate how lazy journalists are. If they see someone has written a new article, they blatantly copy it. Half the work has been done already. If they see a bunch of articles on the same topic, then it must be trending & of interest, so they copy it to jump onto the band wagon.
This happened with a friend of mine in grad school. She literally studied watching grass grow. The most boring thing in the world. Someone did an original article on her & her work. When it ran the next month, she got phone calls for weeks from other journalists asking her questions and running stories on her. I think in total, she had 6 or 7 articles and one radio interview. About watching grass grow. She also got the odd request for about 6 months after that.
Hi friends. I present a question.
Who the fuck cares how many Twitter followers a said person has? Is this the new e-penis? I assume it has to do with spam and advertising somehow (exposure hits) but in all, it sounds silly.
...unless you're in on this sort of thing early, you usually can't really profit much from it. You can profit, and waste time, but it's better to find the next frontier rather than jumping on the bandwagon.
I know some guys who do this sort of thing and they always end up using a combination of outsourced labor and automated posters, and it's really not that hard to do. XRumer usually does a decent job at this sort of thing, amongst others. The thing is, they were in on it early, before twitter even became a thing in the mainstream.
Really, though, aside from just selling followers to people and generating a bit of ad revenue or whatever, this is probably less profitable than splogging and having cloaking pages take non-spider visitors to your sales pages... From there you just spam links...though Penguin made that a bit more difficult. Either way, this type of marketing suffers diminishing returns faster than anything I've ever worked with, otherwise, I'd be spamming twitter right now.
Do you think the same type of activities are targeting Amazon, eBay, FaceBook or Google?
Controlling online perception of preference and/or demand has to be as lucrative and powerful as conventional radio, TV or newspaper advertising used to be, especially since they all go hand-in-glove these days. And if it made Google 'worth' bazillions, it's gotta be worth gaming, right?
Whither goest mine eyeballs goest those who seek to pull the wool over them.
Yahoo is viewed as a failing company, and it makes over $300,000USD per employee. Twitter on the other hand makes $100,000USD. The metric I always hear is that a person costs the company 2x their salary.
Can we be done with twitter yet? I mistakingly used it for a service at my work, and the site is simply too unreliable to be trusted. Twitter's CEO must be sitting fat and happy, but it seems like a very silly company with no purpose.
baracuda is getting ready to sell reputations of your followers ? :)
spam blocking, having been commoditized years ago, the security folks need to move on to something 'in'
They are going to go to the 800,000 fake followers of Romney and grab the already fake picture and bio information - from the accounts that have never made a "tweet" - and salvage that to use for more fake accounts? Why don't they grab the info from actual real, working accounts instead? Wouldn't that be more convincing than continually cloning purchased crap accounts? Or did they find that there are actually only about 100 real working accounts on the whole "Twitterverse"?
FTFA: "the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18"
I don't know about that. I checked eBay and I can get "20,000 Twitter followers [48 hours]". Check it out for yourself. ebay.com
Also, the original article: "A Dealer can earn as much as $800/day" becomes "earn roughly $800 per day".
Having noted that I think Romney is the worst possible thing for this country and will, if elected, be 10 times worst than Hitler and Stalin and Sarah Palin.
On BuySellAds you can pay up to a few hundred dollars for a paid tweet. However, some of the sites that appear to have thousands of followers have little traffic. No doubt there is one or two sites on there with fake followers offering Paid tweets.
This is not BSA problem really, but I would recommend being mindful and researching the site in question before coughing up the dollars.
As soon as I saw the headline, I knew I would read "Romney" in the summary. Keep the narrative alive, soldiers.
Many voters, probably most, are too apathetic to bother evaluating candidates on their merits. Instead they extrapolate those merits from things like poll numbers and other horse race indicators.
Let's put a twist on this. What if instead of "apathy" we switch in "availability." If you watch US corporate news or read (almost) any newspaper, you'll only find what you mentioned: poll numbers from biased surveys, Twitter sound-bites, pretty pictures of candidates in their shirt sleeves. That's all a voter has to go on unless they do their own research. Which is time consuming even for those who excel at analysis.
Quick, where do you go to critique a voting record, review the original bill, find out what was crammed in at the last minute, and figure out why a politician voted as they did? When you go to the source you'll find volumes of data. There's 6 hours gone, though with some small but significant knowledge digested. There's a lot of analysis on the Internet, some that's really excellent, but then again you're on a search for good info with a lot of effort dedicated to filtering the various biases. So to save time you start to look for a few analysts to trust, maybe one that other people have found, one that's popular. And you're back where you started, voting with a crowd.
One of propaganda's methods is the bandwagon effect, and these fake Twitter accounts use the technique because it has a history of working.
From the post, " the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time."
Wonderful!
Now, pray tell, does the 'dealer' have the capacity to kill the 150,000 followers within 60 seconds?
Prying Minds Want To Know!
Roberts also doesn't believe in overriding the POUTS or Con-gress. So in a manner of speaking he is in fact a drone.