Inside the Real Economy Behind Fake Twitter Followers 75
colinneagle writes "People continue to pay money for Twitter followers, and, naturally, a deep network of developers and merchants has arisen to feed the market. A Barracuda Labs study found that the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time, sometimes more. Those who can control 20,000 fake accounts and can attract sales of $20 or more — the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18 — stand to earn roughly $800 per day, according to Barracuda Labs. Keep in mind that very little of this work is manual; the dealers could easily control a system of botnets and set up a few software tools to automate much of the process. Using Twitter's API, developers can design programs that collect all the information of a given group of Twitter users, such as, for example, the 800,000 users following Mitt Romney's account. These programs don't necessarily hijack these accounts — they copy the images and text from their profiles and tweets. This pool of information can then be automatically ported into accounts based on an algorithm that automates the registration process on a massive scale."
Re:Partisan Politics, again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Partisan Politics, again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, no way ~6% of a country could possibly be interested in what the holder of its highest political office has to say.
Re:Partisan Politics, again.... (Score:2, Insightful)
> I doubt there's 18 million people that interested in him.
Really? You dont think that as a leader of the country of 350 million people... and the most internationally well know country on a planet of 4 billion people... that 18 million of them would follow him on twitter? I cant really think of any other individual who would be likely to have more followers than him.
Sounds like a cell phone plan (Score:5, Insightful)
the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time, sometimes more. Those who can control 20,000 fake accounts and can attract sales of $20 or more — the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18 — stand to earn roughly $800 per day,
Throw in some "unlimited" and some "caps" and it sounds like a cellphone confuseopoly plan. Break it down simple for a fool like me... Lets look at the market. Say you're 18 and hired as the "social media director" at your F500 megacorp for $250K/yr and your key performance indicator is gaining 1000 twitter followers per month. That means you'll have to whip out your personal credit card for... What, $18 every month, or $18 for every 1000 PER month, or $20 for 20 kiloaccounts or what?
So... twitter is basically a "service" where fake media personalities have their PR agent write fake posts for fake followers to read, because it makes money, huh?
Re:Paid Twitter Followers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like organizing a speech in a stadium to only fill the seats with stuffed mannequins... then proceeding to do the speech anyway.
And then taking a picture from high above in a blimp and putting it in the paper with the headline about the speech given to a full stadium. The public doesn't know that the audience is fake, but it sure looks good for the speaker.
Re:To what end? (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming so, what is the tangible benefit of doing that? Does Mitt Romney win the election if he has more (albiet fake) Twitter followers?
Many voters, probably most, are too apathetic to bother evaluating candidates on their merits. Instead they extrapolate those merits from things like poll numbers and other horse race indicators. "Well, if that many people follow Romney on Twitter, he must be legit." "Well if more people favor Romeny over Obama in this or that completely unscientific and opaquely evaluated popularity contest, he must be the better candidate!"
Its true that only an idiot would use a candidate's number of Twitter followers to make their choice in a political election. Which is exactly why this is a potential problem.