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/
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
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
"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.
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!