
Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers - patomolina
http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04098
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uptown
I have no desire to buy "fame", but I do wish Twitter wouldn't correlate the
number of people I'm allowed to follow to the number of people that follow me.
I frequently hit their cap, and am forced to scan my following list for
accounts that have stopped tweeting. This seems like a poor way of handling
that scenario - you penalize the person that is still using the service that
actively follows the constantly evolving network of users.

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RainforestCx
I would really like to be to run this sort of analysis (or use tools/services
that perform it for me), regardless of how efficient the current popular
methods are. Is anyone familiar with the tools or services available to do so?
Thanks in advance!

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davecap1
You can try twitteraudit.com (I made it a few years ago). It doesn't do
anything fancy at all, but it works pretty well with about a 10% margin of
error. It only looks at a sample of 5000 followers though.

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aresant
Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting
a potential customer to trust you.(1)

Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness
should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely
persuasive.

I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake
followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of
undisclosed endorsements via podcasts / you tubers / etc

(1)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof)

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droopybuns
I don't find a high follower count suggestive of anything. I think that your
threshold for regulatory intervention needs to be much higher. Vanity metrics
are not a threat to the marketplace.

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firasd
Absolutely. Once the govt takes an interest in keeping follower counts
"accurate" it's going to meddle with all sorts of other metrics in your app
too.

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ksk
Introduce the concept of verified and unverified number of followers. If
you're willing to lose "verified number of followers" status, allow someone to
pay and fill out any number they want in the followers field. If they want a
verification of the number of followers (so that marketing companies feel
comfortable paying celebs to sell products) have them pay a fee. Its a win
both ways.

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paulpauper
To call it 'dangerous' is a bit of a stretch..maybe annoying. The easiest
detection system is that the tweets of an account with a lot of fake followers
will have very little, if any, interaction . I'm kinda irked stuff like this
makes to arxiv but you still need the 'two referrals' system to upload stuff.
I can't image the worst math paper is much worse than this.

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danso
I agree that the easiest detection system is to look at engagement of
tweets...I have a few thousand followers and I average about 2 to 5
favorites/retweets...so if I see someone with 50,000 followers and less than
that average, I get a little suspicious. But most people don't think to look
at this...and news outlets are quick to jump on what seems like a valid tweet
from a valid account. The reason why we don't see much of this happening is
because most of the people who buy followers probably aren't hoping to do
anything particularly malicious or disruptive.

