Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
News at 11
Sometimes it's better not having signature
"Some fake accounts look even better than real accounts do."
Well thank god for that. http://xkcd.com/810/
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.
Anveto
Irrelevant things are not relevant! Why was/is so much stock placed on the number of "followers" a person has? It seems as though this places unwarranted weight/emphasis on opinions and people that shouldn't really have that. (Read this as Ms. Jenny McCarthy ranting about vaccinations being taken as relevant to a real discussion on health care.)
Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally wo
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.
Meow
Is how many of these fake accounts have real followers!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Twitter followers, like Facebook friends and similar sorts of social media, fool people into thinking that something is popular. A lot of the people who are fooled into thinking that something is popular are also gullible enough to think that because something is popular it must be good, and thus start buying the product / voting for the candidate / publicly praising the organization.
The people who hire companies like this see the world as a game of hype, illusion, and fakery with the goal of having the next "Gagnam Style".
I am officially gone from
I don't understand. Your account is following people you never told it to follow? I can see having a bunch of bogus people following you but the other way around. My account has never randomly followed people I did not want it to follow.
"Some fake accounts look even better than real accounts do."
Not that that's a very high bar...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There's a lot of accounts out there that are only created as placeholders. I have a few myself that I created for different domain names I own.
And there lies the truth about Twitter: For the most part, Twitter is now simply an extension of commercial branding, as in "Nothing To See" and "Nothing Of Value Was Lost"... I mean, if you're really interested in reading Justin Bieber's latest drama in 140 chars... Twitter is now (and has been for some time) simply an extension of the corporate promotion game.
As such, does it really matter how many Twitter Twaddle Accounts are fake? Most people who follow Twitter Twaddle are "fake" in more ways than one.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I just followed the link from TFA to the Social Bakers Fake Followers App. It identified 9 fake followers. Two area real people who I have had meaningful 2-way twitter exchanges with. One has actually collaborated with my wife on a musical project. Definitely not bots. A few are accounts intended to provide automated updates, so yes they're bots but good bots. It missed every one I suspected as fake.
Some (MANY!) people are more concerned with social acceptance than self-determination.
Politicians and news media use this to "lead" them by creating the illusion that other people are thinking or doing what the "leaders" want them to think or do, with the implied threat of ostracization and loss of social-network support if they fail to conform.
The progressive movement as a whole, political factions on most parts of the political map, ethnic groups and other "communities", and religions (mainstream and "cult") are particularly noted for this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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!
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.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"