Slashdot Mirror
Twitter's Fake Followers Watching IPO Closely
kraksmoka writes "Is your social media pro 'making it go viral' by pressing a button instead of interacting with a real audience? The purchase and use of fake followers by small to mid-sized social media agencies is rising on Twitter and there is concern that the growth of fake followers can't be stopped. "
As a fake investor, I will follow this development closely.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
/. seems to be falling behind in another important trend. Virtually all the posters here appear genuine, which must be holding back the site ranking somehow.
Gently reply
Can someone explain to me what is the value for a company to have a bunch of fake followers on their twitter account?
CEO's brag about it at their Sunday golf games?
My aunt earns $8034 a week fake following people on Twitter!
This is the same as any other optimisation task (eg link farms for Page Rank). People will try ti and (eventually) Twitter will work-out how to clamp-down on it.
Rinse and repeat.
Why is this news?
Can't these services just die soon? Who are the stupid fucking idiots using them?
(signed)
Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Dick Costolo (twitter), Marissa Mayer
Twitter can determine when, where, and from what IP address an account is created. they can also follow its activity patterns, likes, etc. to build a profile of the account. In addition to using that data to generate revenue it could look t typical behavioral patterns of real users and establish a set o rules that indicate the account belongs to an actual person. It could then flag accounts that appear to be fake and not count them as followers. This is straightforward behavioral analysis and pattern recognition. Of course, since growth in accounts are the driving force behind Twitter's value, while they have a need for people to trust that Twitter's user base is real there is the competing demand of having a growing user base. the risk to Twitter is if us of fake accounts becomes widespread companies will discount the value of the number of followers accordingly and Twitter's revenue stream and value will take a hit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Lock your tweets
With Silicon Valley so bent on "frictionless" experience for the mobile and "grown now, monetize later" there is no practical way to secure any of the existing social networks. One only need to reverse engineer mobile API, rip the keys and you are good-to-go creating fake accounts based on the phone book via TOR or rented botnet. Not everyone can do this, but we are getting close to where tools like Dalvik emulators and smali will let moderately talented skript kiddies to pull it off.
What I described above will not kill Twitter, spam is expected and humans did tolerate a lot of it with email without giving up on the platform. For now it is still possible to detect crude tweet scraping and attribution-less reposing with creative use of geolocation, sentiment analysis and so on. So if spam volume goes up, then you can throw resources at keeping it down.
What will kill Twitter is the first hack that manages to integrate natural language algorithm with tweeter bots. I can't think of a way to counter this without draconian clamp-down on account creation.
browse at -1 and have a look at the comments...i mod often and you're right /. is *definitely* more genuine than most... /. is crawling with paid Public Relations staffers (Fox News is def. not the only one to do this), paid commentors, and maybe even an actual experimental bot (APK...)
They ruin the top of the comments on anything to do with Snowden, the oil industry, and the Trayvon Martin case type stuff....techies havent' gotten *more* conservative in the last 10 years...but /. comments on average have...it's because of PR and paid commentors
We *genuine* humans need to be more discerning than ever...there are people, much like us, whose entire job is to create false perceptions on things like /.
Its kind of important, for you know, idea neutrality that we all be smarter, respond to only comments that are value added and of course...and I need this advice as much as anyone...
***DONT FEED THE TROLLS***
Thank you Dave Raggett
Seems like this should be easy to stop. Fake followers likely all follow the same set of groups and all don't follow the same set of other groups (competitors to the social media company's clients, for instance). They should be detectable.
And I suspect they're already following random other people they've crawled. A "Do you know this person?" type question in the client could alert them with enough positives.
those studies are not at all informative to this discussion & /. definitely has had an uptick in paid commenters (look at UID #'s & it tells the whole story for you)
they measure **self reported attitudes** and have not been replicated b/c...they're not worth a researcher's time...
I'm in my mid-30s now and there is no way any of my older geek friends have gotten **more Republican** in their personal philosophy...from pro-choice to pro-life? if anything you can see a measurable move towards atheism...
You may argue that more geeks either *dont' vote* or vote for a 'libertarian' than previously and that I would grant you...but there's not chance in hell educated people are becoming more conservative
Thank you Dave Raggett
also, those studies are global-oriented with their language and issues...
France can be considered "socially conservative" by the definition and normalization those tests use...
American "social conservatives" and French "social conservatives" disagree on virtually every issue a US conservative finds important...guns, abortion, civil rights, nudity/porn, religion...
you're confusing two very different concepts
Thank you Dave Raggett
and how you could never make a dime off it - unless i'm just that out of touch. The only people who made money are the ones that got it for the 26 dollar IPO price, and since everyone has been waiting for the next big google, facebook, etc, they simply bought into it without knowing what twitter really is - an app amongst apps that is used by people who generally don't have a lot of money (under 18 yr olds)
Fake twitter followers will make twitter useless for metrics and for business purposes, which would make the value drop.
I addressed the "more conservative" thing above to another commenter...the definition of 'conservative' in those studies and 'conservative' in US politics is **very** different and completely unfit for comparison...
It measures 'conservative' in the sense of risk taking...like would you cash some of your kid's college fund to invest in a stock tip from a trusted friend?
younger...more likely
older...less likely
That doesn't mean that getting older makes you favor policies that protect companies like M$ and become pro-life!!!!
Those studies mean 'conservative' in risk-taking...not politics and policy!!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Look it, the goal is to make a company with a lot of perceived potential and then sell it - usually to the public in the form of an IPO.
That's where the money is - selling it off to suck...investors.
Now, if the company were really profitable or really had potential, the prinpals would have kept it to themselves.
There are a lot of extremely profitable companies that are kept private because they are that good - Cargill for example.
It is mind boggling that people are evidently buying this stock without having looked at their finances, easily available from Google. Surely they would have noticed that Twitter has negative net income of -$64M. Worse, it looks like have had net losses in each of the last three years and their losses appear to be accelerating downward (see graph on top of the page) even with increasing revenue. I have no idea how anybody came up with a $20 market cap value. To me they look like an overpriced loser on their way to bankruptcy.
How about we accept that Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin don't really matter and just ignore them? Nah, marketing people need their meaningless metrics to justify their salaries and spending.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Fake accounts are the way anonymity works. If you value anonymity, you cannot then discourage fake accounts. Without anonymity, you have no privacy. Without privacy, none of your best contributions to society can really be ascribed to true merit (as opposed to attention whoring, etc.).
On the other hand, promoting trademarks are the main way that a business makes people aware that they exist. As long as intellectual property exists, the incentive to market via fake identities will continue to increase. And intellectual property will exist as long as there is greed or pride or cynical anti-collectivism.
There's no need to "stop" companies using fake followers. It's just an incredibly stupid idea. 10,000 real followers indicates some proportion of those people talking to their friends about you, mentioning you on other media, possibly doing crazy fan stuff on youtube. Real followers beget more real followers. That's what viral in this context implies, (although it is a creepy and unattractive term used by creepy and unattractive people.)
10,000 or a million fake followers won't do that for you. Go ahead, throw your money away if you want to pay for imaginary people to say they like you.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
fluoridation
Dude, you're stone-age old ( if I my attach any correlation value to your userID ), which is a compliment in and by itself. I myself am not young. But really: you need to get laid. Get yourself a hooker and some pot, or a line of coke, and blow off some steam. Dude.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Using someones computer/service for something they prohibit and did not intend seems like it would be covered under the laws governing computers. Don't these ad agencies have lawyers? Or are the ad men just not telling their lawyers.
If SPAM is a crime, then this seems to be the same.
You speak of getting laid and getting high as if they are your only aspirations in life.
make it all like spam. maybe worth doing if ya got a hundred million to fish amongst otherwise worthless. Cut the balls of monetizing information. Drown this industry before it grows any larger.
Besides coding, yes, they prolly are.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
XKCD 1057.
So are you saying that fake Twitter followers increase your Google page rank? How does Google connect a Twitter user to a web page? I can see how posting a link to your website and having lots of people click on it is potentially useful, but I don't see how having a bunch of fake robotic followers clicking on the links you tweet about does anything other than look suspicious to Google. And maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see how anybody can sell "getting real people to be interested in the stuff you Tweet and pay actual attention to it" for fractional pennies per human follower.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
you summarize the history of paid commenters on /. recently really well...especially threading the needle and explaining the above section...
that's high level stuff and yes I agree I saw it used...unfortunately I still see it happening to this day
we're getting wiser to it for sure, your comment proves just that...
and ppl wonder why......I use the punctuation and sentence breaks that i use_method to my madness ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
By product placement on Kim Kardashian's ass.
tomhudson = Barbara, not Barbie (same person) - & "they" left in May 2012 after I did when I found they had the SAME email is how (which that scum changed JUST as he/she left no less).
I caught that scum using MULTIPLE accounts here to mod herself UP with & her opponents DOWN with.
HOWEVER: I *have* had IMPOSTERS attempt to impersonate me & since I note TomHudson/Barbara, not Barbie above?
Her PAL Jeremiah Cornelius was CAUGHT doing so (annoying us), here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 (his name's on that post attempting to bother you all, to make ME look like a spammer, but the FOOL FORGOT TO SUBMIT AS AC that time & submitted using his registered 'luser' name instead giving himself away).
---
Now - As far as Snowden/the NSA, etc.? Hey - I don't *BOTHER* generally anymore as far as replying - Why? Folks KNOW which end is up is why! No "spin" from the government's lackeys works on them: a GOOD thing!
So, folks here don't NEED my input telling them the same - as I do NOT believe in "preaching to the choir" - & it's PRETTY OBVIOUSLY TRANSPARENT as to "which way the wind blows" around here on that, which doesn't require reinforcement since I agree with the general sentiments around here regarding the NSA.
---
* Thus - I "ruin" nothing! Well - NO, I take THAT back: I ruin the b.s. that often goes around here by unscrupulous others in the falsehoods they preach @ most is all (e.g. - for YEARS here the "linux is invulnerable" b.s. OR adblock fans + their FAR inferior tool vs. hosts files for 2 examples thereof)...
APK
P.S.=> Which "upsets" the hidden ulterior motives the "Open SORES" bunch here has, as well as the 1/2 truths they spout to do it - (I do so simply by using actual VALID technical data based responses vs. their b.s. to which they OFTEN find themselves speechless against (due to facts blowing 'em away & unjustifiable downmod's = their ONLY "weapon" then... effete & pitiful!)).
... apk