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. "

Comments

This is relevant to my interests

[paiute]

As a fake investor, I will follow this development closely.

Re:This is relevant to my interests

[mpbrede]

We need to have your comment modded up by fake moderators. A higher positive ranking on your comment will indicate better acceptance in social media circles.

Re:This is relevant to my interests

[Mitchell314]

And I will claim this as a fake first post. #slashdot

Re:This is relevant to my interests

[girlintraining]

As a fake investor, I will follow this development closely.

* Starts following. :)

Re:This is relevant to my interests

[thunderclap]

Fake newsletter. Send fake money for a subscription.

Will Bitcoins work?

Re:What's the point?

[Joining Yet Again]

Real people are more likely to follow something that seems popular, no matter how broken it is.

See also Microsoft, Christianity, the Soviet Union, capitalism, and American Football.

Re:What's the point?

[Nidi62]

This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. Except here the followers are not real and so people buying this SEO snake oil are being ripped-off.

I think there is research out there showing that people are more likely to follow accounts that have a lot of followers. So, what you do is hire a firm to give you a bunch of fake followers in the hopes that real people start following you.

Re:What's the point?

[rudy_wayne]

This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. Except here the followers are not real and so people buying this SEO snake oil are being ripped-off.

I noticed something similar on a photo-sharing website I use. I noticed that I had a lot of followers. WTF? Who are these people? When I started looking into it, my "followers" had posted no pictures or had a page of a couple of random generic pictures. And I noticed that my followers all had followers who had followers . . . . etc.

LOL.

Fake people following other fake people.

Paid commentors

[globaljustin]

Virtually all the posters here appear genuine

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***

Re:Paid commentors

[sinij]

/. crowd is getting older, and older you get more likely are you to become/identify conservative. There is actual research backing this up, but I am too lazy to look it up for you. I think this is why we see a lot of TP nuttery appearing over here and not because paid shills and PR firms.

Re:Paid commentors

[game kid]

A moderator a day keeps the Real Name policies away.

Re:Paid commentors

[Joining Yet Again]

Yes exactly. Every scheme has "salt of the earth" people who just want to do an honest day's work, exploitative dickheads at the top, and a mixture half way between the two. That Bible-bashing gun-worshipper is probably just as decent, honest and hardworking as the girl who makes peace signs and sticks flowers in her hair, but they are taught to hate each other.

Re:Paid commentors

[Joining Yet Again]

I'm as far from "poor student" as you can get, so no vested interest here!

If there is anything you should learn with age, it's JUST HOW MUCH you owe to other people, without whom you'd be scraping around in the dirt, no matter your personal opinion of your own genius. If you think that people are sponging off you, you're learning nothing at all, and just taking advantage of others.

Re:Paid commentors

[kelemvor4]

... because any opinion differing wildly from yours must be that of a shill, bot, or troll? Accept the fact that Slashdot has gone mainstream and there are people with a diverse set of political and social ideals here now. Or, continue to think that your opinion is the only one. Your call.

I can tell you I work in IT, and at my office the "left wing" line of thinking is definitely more rare than the right.

Re:A simple tech solution

[Samantha Wright]

Computer-administered Turing tests are win-win—the arms race doesn't end until someone develops strong AI, at which point the followers are no longer fake.

except they aren't

[globaljustin]

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

Re:except they aren't

[dugancent]

Eh, maybe. The Slashdot user base had really dropped over the last few years and few influential tech people hang here anymore. I don't really see us as a worthy demographic for paid shills.

There might be a few, but it's nothing like it was in even 5 years ago.

Re:except they aren't

[rtb61]

Reality was the paid trolls lacked the intellectual capacity to actively troll /. without being recognised and the product they were promoting targeted, not the trolls themselves, as this is a pointless activity but the promoted product. They didn't just give up though, they attempted to kill /. by flooding the first few pages of comments with back and fourth idiot twitter like chatter but when whole threads started getting killed, it disrupted that tactic. So paying for promotion was doing more harm than good, last major product of /. counter attack was Apple. /. has a wide base of computer geeks/nerds, scientists and, journalists amongst others. So ideas put up here and challenged here can end up getting a wide spread beyond /.

When it comes to being a worthy demographic of paid shills being naive, gullible and a victim of marketing is nothing to be proud of but rather ashamed of and that is the group that paid shills consider the most worthy. There just isn't any point targeting a group that will definitely question and challenge and if found truly wanting attack it with fervour.

As for twitter, it is likely near at it's peak as with any social fad and being a follower, I mean seriously a follower ("I worship you please deign to anoint me with your most worth once sentence dribble and bring light to my most miserable existence"), who in hell really wants to acknowledge their own pitiful existence as to be a follower of someone else's single sentence dribble. Talk about truly desperately needing to get a life of their own. So that will be twitters downfall, the public acknowledgement of the lameness of being a twitter follower, a sheep following the herd and the ridicule that follows.

American vs French "social conservative"

[globaljustin]

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

not the same 'conservative'

[globaljustin]

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!!!!

Fake followers - fake profits

[Chemisor]

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.

Re:Fake followers - fake profits

[hardtofindanick]

You sound like a typical rational person. You should know by now markets only care about perception, expectation, and potential.

Re:A simple tech solution

[sinij]

>>>Twitter can determine when, where, and from what IP address an account is created.
 
I expect ./ crowd to at least understand that IP is not a reliable identifier. Twitter can only reliably determine when, everything else they know only if bot creator did not bother to spoof it. Behavior-based detection is also problematic - you can easily scrape existing activity, filter out swearing and specific identities, substitute location identifiers for something local and have 100% undetectable bot.

Example: Scrape small-town phone book, run permutation algorithm on second name and street # to avoid collision with real people (but keep everything else intact), add random gender-appropriate picture and follow a random set of big news and artists at creation. Pipe this through TOR, stagger your account creation to avoid tripping volume detection and mind timezones for posting and registering. Proceed to post random scraped tweets that are filtered for positive-biased sentiment.

Re:What's the point?

[Richard_at_work]

Pretty much that, and the ability to say "well, 100,000 people can't be wrong..."

A startup I was recently involved in had their twitter follower count go from about 4,000 to over 100,000 in 72 hours (this was after I left), without any media exposure or obvious campaigns - that sort of thing cannot be legitimate, however you look at it.

One easy way for Twitter to combat this sort of thing would be to put a time graph of follows for an account in the public arena, and then people could see the huge jumps that cannot correlate with real world events, and make their own judgement calls. Anything you can't find much about on Google but has massive jumps in followers in shirt periods if time is a quick way to raise suspicions about legitimacy.

This is daft

[Peter Harris]

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.

interesting synopsis

[globaljustin]

They didn't just give up though, they attempted to kill /. by flooding the first few pages of comments with back and fourth idiot twitter like chatter but when whole threads started getting killed, it disrupted that tactic.

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 ;)