Fake Twitter Followers Becomes Multimillion Dollar Business

RougeFemme writes "There are more than two dozen companies that sell fake Twitter accounts. Those that sell them claim to make up to one million dollars per week. Two Italian security researchers estimate that there are as many as 20 million fake Twitter follower accounts. It's very difficult to tell the different between fake and real Twitter accounts saying, 'Some fake accounts look even better than real accounts do.'"

Comments

Only 20 million?

[uberbrainchild]

I would have thought there would be more. I have 6 or 7 accounts but they represent either a website or sometimes a business. Only one with my name.

The "why" that the article misses...

[meowgoesthecat]

One of the comments on the article was more informative to me than the article alone...

"...When I needed to get people to pay attention to something quickly, I created a twitter account, paid for 30,000 followers, and then followed about 1000 people I had identified as having mattered. In return over the next two days roughly 400 of those "people who mattered" had followed me -- in part I am sure because my Twitter account said it had over 10,000 followers.

Over the next two weeks Twitter killed off all of the fake followers BUT I retained the real followers who might not have paid any attention EXCEPT for the initial batch of fake followers.

It is NOT about spam. It is about purchasing "legitimacy" quickly."

You're welcome.

What I'd love to know

[OzPeter]

Is how many of these fake accounts have real followers!

We told you that in 2011

[Animats]

My 2011 paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" mentions that. It also names providers of fake "likes", fake "+1"s, fake reviews (some of which are very funny), fake accounts, fake IP addresses, and fake phone numbers for fake account verification. There's a whole ecosystem out there generating this junk.

Most of the sites identified in that paper are still in business. Some of the more blatant ones are "bulkaccounts.com" ("1000 Twitter accounts for $99") and "pvaspot.com ("We Offer Top Quality Forwarded Phone Numbers used to create Phone Verified Accounts with a no questions asked 100% guarantee at Competitive Prices with Excellent Customer Service."). The fact that the same sites are active after two years indicates that the major social media networks can't or won't stop them.

As we point out in the paper, social media spam is cheaper and easier than link-farm spam. With a link farm, you have to set up servers, keep them up, fill them with fresh content. This gets expensive. With social media spam, the social media service hosts your spam for you, for free!

Twitter is what it was intended to be.

[Molochi]

The Facespaces evolved into an ad serving vehicle for corporations, but they still serve as a point of casual contact for people you know.

VERY early on, like when it was in beta still, Twitter was being commented on by people who were already very famous and popular and who really should not have heard of it yet unless they were insiders involved its creation.

Twitter was created purely as a way to serve "recomendations" to fans of famous people. "I'm reading book X." "I'm listening to song Y" "My cantidate is Senator Blarginsworth" "My favorite thing is...". IF they (the twitterers) get paid to post a specific recommendation then it stands that they'd get paid more if they have more followers. Fake followers seem like a high value scam of the system since the only work that needs to be done is creating the account and following people that pay for it. Those same companies that do SEO and Social Media Marketing have to put a lot more work when they blogspam and shill on forums.