
Someone bought my Twitter account 10K fake/bot followers - esnard
https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/when-bots-attack-af7f9f87b612
======
zxlk21e
It's very unlikely someone bought them for him to make him look bad. Instead,
a lot of the time when fake followers are created they are programmed to look
'normal' by following other accounts and engaging. Otherwise a single follow
target can be a real outlier and easier to triangulate.

source: worked in spam for a long time.

Also, 10k accounts is like $5-$10 for most 'in the business'. There are a lot
of services that sell for this upwards of $50-$100 though. We're not talking
about a lot of investment.

~~~
danso
Why do you think it so unlikely? In the media world, some people faced career-
damage after the NYT expose:

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-
ric...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-richard-
roeper-twitter-20180202-story.html)

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/journalists-struggle-
ex...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/journalists-struggle-explain-why-
they-bought-fake-twitter-followers-n843871)

~~~
52-6F-62
I don't think they're saying it never happens, but I've heard similar reports
to OC.

It's a measure taken to normalize the accounts— it muddies the water. That
way, they look more like average personal accounts than obviously paid-for
followers. The costs on the click-farm side is averaged out so they just have
the "clickers" or bots follow a huge variety of people and companies while
also putting the most backing to the accounts belonging to whoever hired them.

------
blakesterz
This was way more interesting than I thought it would be.

"This is neither a bug nor isolated to my account. Twitter’s entire platform
is propped up by misleading/inflated follower/following counts, which include
accounts Twitter themselves have identified as “suspected spam accounts” (and
have been identified as such for years)."

I never knew that Twitter did that “suspected spam accounts” accounts thing.

Also... he calls this an "attack", which seems like the wrong word to use
somehow. They bots don't seem to be attacking him, they just follow him.
Probably doesn't matter much, but I kept waiting for an "attack" to happen,
but then it became obvious they're just following him.

~~~
monsieurbanana
I think attack is perfectly appropriate. Having 10k of obviously fake accounts
following you is a massive hit to your reputation.

~~~
ryanlol
>Having 10k of obviously fake accounts following you is a massive hit to your
reputation.

What sort of people do you hang out with?

~~~
Jemmeh
It's similar to Amazon reviews-- if a lot of them are fake people think "well
this product sucks actually, they just bought reviews." or at least "I don't
actually know if this is any good"

Take it to an entertainer/journalist/politician and it's "well this person
sucks actually, they aren't really anyone important and their opinion on
things doesn't matter".

~~~
ryanlol
I don’t think it’s at all similar to Amazon reviews.

It’s relatively normal to look at Amazon reviews, but it takes a special kind
of a person to browse through someones social media followers.

~~~
Jemmeh
Well the fake bots will post fake comments and spammy links and stuff too, so
it's right in front of you for the most part.

I dunno, I poke around in followers a little bit but it's usually to the tune
of "what other developers follow this person? I might want to follow them
too". Not that I use twitter much so eh. Maybe that only really works on the
smaller accounts I usually look at. S:

------
tjwds
> "I am certain that my account was 'maliciously [targeted by] someone with
> bot followers to make [me] look bad.'"

Imagine explaining this concept to someone five years ago, let alone ten or
twenty, and trying not to come across as bad science fiction.

~~~
hartator
Newspapers buying themselves is not something new.

~~~
jobigoud
Or authors buying copies of their own book to kickstart themselves into the
best seller club.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544)

------
Shoothe
I just searched for "buy Twitter followers" and it seems 10000 followers cost
only $40: [https://www.socialshop.co/twitter/buy-twitter-
followers/](https://www.socialshop.co/twitter/buy-twitter-followers/)

It's funny looking at the page with various packs, just like a normal service:
"express delivery", "high quality"!

------
maaaats
A year or so ago, it was trending in Norway to post that you would donate 1kr
(~.1usd) per like, and then challenge your friends to do the same. I bought a
friend thousand likes for a few bucks.

So in essence, I donated 100usd for about 10usd, haha

------
dbt00
To play devil's advocate briefly, assume that Twitter decided to delete all
accounts it flagged as spam/bot accounts tomorrow. What would the long term
fallout be? It's unlikely that people selling follower counts would simply go
away, just become a more active adversary. By putting bots simply behind a
quality filter (a pseudo shadow-ban), they avoid an escalating arms race in
bot account creation.

The real fix here is to stop showing follower counts completely, since they're
trash.

~~~
leereeves
Except follower counts motivate active users to stay on Twitter. For some
people, Twitter is a social game and follower counts are the score.

~~~
HenryBemis
Plus advertisers need some tangible metrics in order to distribute their ads
(and the $ that comes with it).

If followers would cease to exist, half of the emptiness/vanity accounts would
also cease to exist (and that is not a bad thing imho).

------
Havoc
That's actually a really clever way of investigating the "fake" eco-
system...buy it and crunch the numbers of what you now know are confirmed
fakes.

~~~
nitrogen
_confirmed fakes_

Does anybody ever sell hacked accounts or accounts where people gave some
random app way too many permissions?

~~~
Jemmeh
Yes but not so much for this in particular. If I want to make a bunch of fake
Twitter followers I would just generate new accounts and generate some fake
tweets. It would take a lot more work to hack someone's account (who then
might also notice it's hacked and try to take it back).

App permissions can still be a problem, but usually that is usually centered
more around identity theft.

------
saas_co_de
The thing is that Twitter can detect bots very easily. They choose not to
because they are desperate to keep their numbers up.

~~~
aiCeivi9
If they ever do, they will be people trying to weaponize it. It reminds me of
old email spam:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job)

~~~
simias
I'm not sure how that would work in the context of Twitter. Spoofing an email
sender is trivial (well, it was before SPF, DKIM and friends). On Twitter the
equivalent would be to make an account behave like a bot so that it got
flagged but I don't see how you could do that without getting its credentials.

------
wila
> My desire to maintain a clean/legit Twitter following was driven by
> necessity. I didn’t want to lose out on any work because of the appearance
> that I was falsely representing my reach/influence.

Run a twitter follower list API call for all followers with the quality filter
on. Save the list to a database

Then run the same call with a the quality filter off and tag each new follower
as a bot.

Then block the bots ?

Of course I realize that he's not a developer, but that would basically fix
his problem and is not too hard to create.

edit: I now saw at twitteraudit.com that you can use it to block followers
too. I guess that he didn't mind THAT much then contrary to the quoted
statement above.

------
Taylor_OD
A few years ago when I realized this was possible I bought myself, a few
friends from high school / college, and a few small companies I like a bunch
of followers. (50K each roughly)

For me it was mostly so people would ask how I got so many followers and I
could tell the silly story. Buying them for my friends was fun because they
would end up tweeting about it and I could watch them try to figure it out
before telling them. For the small companies I actually knew the CEO/CTO's and
ended up talking about it later on. They came out the best because their
accounts were flooded with fake followers but after people saw they had 50K
followers real people started following them. I believe one of the companies
is close to 150K followers now. If only a third of that is real it's still a
lot more than they would have had before.

I looked recently and it seems to be more difficult to do now.

------
gaoshan
I saw this title and promptly went and bought a thousand for my daughter. I
anticipate much squealing and confused "I'm trending!" hollering.

~~~
Buttons840
And thus, your daughter's brain begins to see the pattern that leads to true
fulfillment, having lots of online followers. ;)

~~~
gaoshan
Oh she's already there. I hope this shows her how pointless they really are.
If she looks into her new followers she will see a bunch of odd sounding names
that all follow roughly the same number of people and have no posts so it's
pretty clear something is going on.

------
geektips
I had a facebook page which had 4K followers, it around 2 years to reach that
much people. But one day the page likes Jumped to 12K ,It was targeted by a
guy to make us look bad. I lost interest after this knowing that my audience
are fake bots.

------
circa
How much did he sell it for? As people mention you can buy a lot of fake
followers for cheap. I do like a lot of the data here though.

------
Rotdhizon
This is nothing in the grand scheme of social media account selling/trading.
Go to any social media account marketplace and look through, you can buy any
of the thousands of accounts that are for sale. People will spend literally
thousands of dollars on accounts that have "original" handles, think
dictionary defined one word handles. Then you have people who will spend money
on accounts that have thousands of fake followers, because of how easy it is
to game these platforms for views and followers. In my eyes it really ruins
the fun of cool handles, because people are literally making livings off of
scoping up as many of these accounts as they can and reselling them.

Want to get karma on reddit? Go to one of the endless amount of subs dedicated
to karma farming and make clickbait posts. Turn around and sell the account to
any of the political trolls that love to harvest those accounts.

Want to get followers on twitter/facebook/instagram/xbox/psn? Set your profile
picture to that of any model you can find, claim it's you, then post nothing
but clickbait and fake giveaway promotions. Turn around and sell it to the low
self esteem teenagers who crave internet attention because they can't get it
irl.

Granted you don't see much youtube account selling, I'd say mostly because
since the platform is so old, a majority of the original account handle owners
are long gone from the platform. You do still see it in some aspect though,
especially on Fortnite channels. A bunch of seemingly original account names
come out of nowhere and get a few hundred k subs in a short spam by posting
clickbait fortnite vids? Not a coincidence. Most of those accounts are bought.

Then you have people who lurk through platforms and try an harvest as many
original accounts as they can. I'm not sure how they do it, maybe just
guessing?

The people who sell these accounts know how desperate some people are for
them, that's why so much effort goes in to collecting these accounts. Just
look at what happened with the xbox gamertag refresh, that was a disaster.
What was meant to be an opportunity for anyone to get a cool gt,turned into
bots harvesting thousands of accounts within seconds of them being released,
then sold off.

A driving factor behind this behavior is that their is no effort to stop this.
Instagram I believe tried to crack down, but what can you do really? You can't
be suspicious of various IPs logging in, that's normal behavior even when it's
truly malicious. The only way I can think to catch the selling of accounts
would be to have an AI look at the behavior and flag drastic changes. Have an
account that's normally on a west coast USA IP that posts cute cat photos that
suddenly has a Europe location IP and it flooding its feed with clickbait?
Probably a new owner.

In reality though, the amount of people who care about this is very minimal.
It's a small niche of that consists of mostly teenagers/young adults who grew
up in the digital/video game centric age. The need to impress others by having
a cool online identity is paramount here.

EDIT: To give examples, I should include some prices. Want a 1 letter
instagram account? It'll run you between $10,000-$50,000 if you can find
someone selling. Want a 2 letter twitter handle? it'll cost you a few
hundred/thousand depending on the letters. Want a two letter xbox gt? it'll
cost you a few thousand. Want an original gmail account? It'll cost a few
thousand. 3 letter accounts of most of the social media platforms range from a
few hundred to a few thousand depending on if it's actually a word, looks
cool, or if it's just a random assortment of characters and letters.

~~~
jobigoud
> Granted you don't see much youtube account selling

YouTube (and Twitch) have the "view bot" problem though, where you can buy
views (viewbotting) for a video to make it appear popular.

------
teslacar
Buying followers is a good idea actually. There are fewer restrictions on
Twitter accounts that have a lot of followers.

~~~
CharlesW
It's not because your engagement/user goes down (unless you now also start
paying for fake engagement).

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fwgwgwgch
This is much more blatant in my country- India.

Rich no-name dudes get themselves a birthday trend (sometimes worldwide)
albeit briefly. Given that Twitter has personnel manually looking at trends it
shouldn't be hard for them to immediately kill that trend. I've often seen
them go on for hours and started by accounts which follow the standard bot
template in their bio.

Of course of this were a trend about wiki leaks twitter is quick to suppress.
I know people in the US like to pick political sides but they're slowly
"progressing" themselves towards 1984 by supporting this.

~~~
yorby
and here I was thinking we were already experiencing 1984 (maybe even a bit
worst)

