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: (Score:1)
Highest? He's not a king.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I dunno, I'd say Obama is more powerful than Roberts overall. The Supreme Court can occasionally overrule the President, but on most days the President has a lot more influence. Roberts ain't got no drones.
Re: (Score:2)
Roberts ain't got no drones.
Touche
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
...and the most internationally well know country on a planet of 4 billion people...
7.
There are 7(+) billion living humans on Earth.
Otherwise, spot on.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure that the latter in your statement is 1/2 of the Earth's population, so the math would not work.
Re: (Score:2)
...and the most internationally well know country on a planet of 4 billion people...
7.
There are 7(+) billion living humans on Earth.
Otherwise, spot on.
Only 4 billion of them own cellphones the other 3 billion don't count in an article like this.
No, I'm not making this up, there really are 4 billion world wide cell phone owners. Do not confuse this with total subscriber numbers as there are plenty of people with more than one account. There are (insane as it sounds) almost exactly the same number of cell phone company accounts/active devices as human beings.
Re: (Score:2)
B) 4 billion cell phones owners != 4 billion unique owners. I own at least 3 smart phones myself.
Re: (Score:2)
Not true. Many have the same IPv4 address!
Re: (Score:2)
Please do.
Re: (Score:2)
While your point has some merit, you are obviously about two decades behind on the Earth's population. You are off by nearly 3 billion people.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt there's 18 million people that interested in him.
In him, sure, more than 18 million are probably objectively interested in him. Interested in his spammy twitter feed? Have you seen that thing? Good lord no. Most of those 18 million have to be zombie accounts which haven't been logged into for years or purchased accounts.
https://twitter.com/BarackObama [twitter.com]
""20% of Iowa’s electricity now comes from wind, powering our homes and our businesses in a way that’s clean and renewable."—President Obama"
"Summer sale: Pick up a tank top for 25% off
Re: (Score:1)
To what end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To what end? (Score:4, Informative)
From the second link in the summary, first paragraph:
Some people do it just out of simple competition, essentially throwing their money away so they can boast more Twitter followers than their friends. Others do it to boost their corporate profiles, while even more high-profile cases have led to better reputations in the world of online clout, and thus job opportunities and advertising revenue.
Re: (Score:2)
well.
first. get a job at stupidfirm CDEF as social media expert. tie your bonus with twitter/fb followers. buy spam followers, cash in the bonus.
It's like SEO (Score:3)
Just like SEO, this is for managers who were given an arbitrary popularity metric to follow rather than being told to create good content people actually wanted to read.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
If Ron Paul has 88 million twitter followers and Mitt Romney has 7, obviously nobody cares about Romney. That means Paul will probably smash the next election, it's not worth voting for Romney because he's got less of a following and is going to be marginalized.
In real life, plenty of people consider a vote for a third party to be a wasted vote. They want their vote to "count", which i don't understand. I don't even vote because the people who are up in front of me aren't of my interests; my vote won't
Re: (Score:2)
"Who do you vote for?" Nobody, cause it's not worth bothering? Seems pretty obvious.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, politicians are all crazy, just in different ways, and all crooked, just in different ways, so I might as well vote for a guy who only sucks a bit and might win, as opposed to a guy who sucks slightly less, but still sucks, and won't win.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
...it's probably as cost efficient for them once other ad markets are saturated.
Saturated by the ads the Democrats are spending tons of money buying, you mean?
You seem to think political spending is being done by just one side here, and imply that there's something wrong with it, too.
Re: (Score:3)
There's a second effect - one way to get more followers is to follow people, there's a vague moral "obligation" to follow people who follow you, so following 10k people might net you 2k followers in return. To stop this kind of spam-style following Twitter limit you
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: (Score:3)
In other cases, such as the alleged purchase of followers by the Romney campaign, I'm sure it went instead something like this:
Campaign Social Media Adviser: We need to leverage social media.
Campaign Manager: He's right! We need to harness the pow
Is it me (Score:3)
Here's an interesting account shop (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I suspect the first......
But it could be both. If he's in charge of stopping fake accounts.....and he really good at it.....and he knows how to circumvent it......he could have near exclusivity on the supply. (You can put it in the 1. 2. 3. Profit model if you want.)
Re:Here's an interesting account shop (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone must be getting ready to sell something. (Score:2)
I smell a sales pitch coming on. I've seen many of these stories cropping up in the last few days.
Either the collective awareness of the Internet has suddenly focused itself on this problem... or well-paid PR companies are doing their job.
Re: (Score:1)
You underestimate how lazy journalists are. If they see someone has written a new article, they blatantly copy it. Half the work has been done already. If they see a bunch of articles on the same topic, then it must be trending & of interest, so they copy it to jump onto the band wagon.
This happened with a friend of mine in grad school. She literally studied watching grass grow. The most boring thing in the world. Someone did an original article on her & her work. When it ran the next month,
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: (Score:1)
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?
Marketing calls that, "Adding value"
Even under semi-manual labor this is possible (Score:1)
If you were to outsource some specific portions of the process to third world sweatshops, you would still be able to remain profitable under those margins, and do so without having to constantly update your algorithms to defeat the platform's bot detection. Efficiency!
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm, now what we need is a service that sells sweatshop services, with emphasis on features like age and technological ability of the workers ...
TwitterAudit built to audit Twitter fraudsters! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
i kinda wondered who does it actually matter to? then i remembered the dot com bubble... some people never learn.
Silly question (Score:2)
Hi friends. I present a question.
Who the fuck cares how many Twitter followers a said person has? Is this the new e-penis? I assume it has to do with spam and advertising somehow (exposure hits) but in all, it sounds silly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You must be new here!
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.
Cool! Can the same thing... (Score:1)
Do you think the same type of activities are targeting Amazon, eBay, FaceBook or Google?
Controlling online perception of preference and/or demand has to be as lucrative and powerful as conventional radio, TV or newspaper advertising used to be, especially since they all go hand-in-glove these days. And if it made Google 'worth' bazillions, it's gotta be worth gaming, right?
Whither goest mine eyeballs goest those who seek to pull the wool over them.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The most frightening words you might hear "This afternoon, President Palin announced..." :(
BuySellAds has paid tweets (Score:1)
This is not BSA problem really, but I would recommend being mindful and researching the site in question before coughing up the dollars.
Another partisan hit piece (Score:1)