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."
To what end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an interesting account shop (Score:5, Interesting)
TwitterAudit built to audit Twitter fraudsters! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a former Blackhat SEO, I can say... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know some guys who do this sort of thing and they always end up using a combination of outsourced labor and automated posters, and it's really not that hard to do. XRumer usually does a decent job at this sort of thing, amongst others. The thing is, they were in on it early, before twitter even became a thing in the mainstream.
Really, though, aside from just selling followers to people and generating a bit of ad revenue or whatever, this is probably less profitable than splogging and having cloaking pages take non-spider visitors to your sales pages... From there you just spam links...though Penguin made that a bit more difficult. Either way, this type of marketing suffers diminishing returns faster than anything I've ever worked with, otherwise, I'd be spamming twitter right now.
Re:Here's an interesting account shop (Score:4, Interesting)
lack of info breeds apathy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Let's put a twist on this. What if instead of "apathy" we switch in "availability." If you watch US corporate news or read (almost) any newspaper, you'll only find what you mentioned: poll numbers from biased surveys, Twitter sound-bites, pretty pictures of candidates in their shirt sleeves. That's all a voter has to go on unless they do their own research. Which is time consuming even for those who excel at analysis.
Quick, where do you go to critique a voting record, review the original bill, find out what was crammed in at the last minute, and figure out why a politician voted as they did? When you go to the source you'll find volumes of data. There's 6 hours gone, though with some small but significant knowledge digested. There's a lot of analysis on the Internet, some that's really excellent, but then again you're on a search for good info with a lot of effort dedicated to filtering the various biases. So to save time you start to look for a few analysts to trust, maybe one that other people have found, one that's popular. And you're back where you started, voting with a crowd.
One of propaganda's methods is the bandwagon effect [wikipedia.org], and these fake Twitter accounts use the technique because it has a history of working.