
The Follower Factory - gregkerzhner
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html
======
randomdrake
The New York Times can graph and identify bots, and other publications /
bloggers have been able to identify networks of them. Supposedly, the best and
brightest get recruited by companies like Twitter and Facebook, but for some
reason they're incapable of identifying and shutting these things down?

What is all the hubbub about machine learning, and things like neural
networks, if they aren't being actively employed by the tech giants?

There's only a couple possible scenarios I can come up with for why this
continues to occur:

1) The best and the brightest actually don't work for any of these companies;
they're just constantly trying to catch up to teams of developers more highly
skilled than them. They are bright, and decent, but ultimately mostly average.

2) The developers in these companies _are_ on par with those who can graph and
identify these networks of malicious and fake content makers, but they just
don't care because # == $.

3) The companies actually have their head so far in the sand that they don't
have the technology, or the resources, to combat this.

I find it hard to believe that people outside of the ecosystem of these
companies have more skill, knowledge, or capabilities (1). It also pains me to
think that hundreds of millions or billions of dollars simply cannot run a
company that can combat this (3).

So that seems to leave complacency (2), which is disturbing and definitely
should send up more red flags about whether we should be giving these networks
any attention at all.

I'd love to hear other possibilities or maybe more information to back up any
of the other scenarios.

~~~
tlb
4) It's not hard to identify bots with 95% accuracy, which is good enough for
reporting, but you need 99.9% accuracy in order to delete their accounts or
else too many genuine accounts will be wrongly terminated.

~~~
tmalsburg2
Super easy to solve: identify likely bots, suspend account, and let owner do
something trivial that only a human can do. False positives solved but the
cost of maintaining large amounts of bots are prohibitive. Also, high-profile
non-bot acounts should be trivial to identify with near certainty.

~~~
jimnotgym
They could join the rest of the internet and serve a Captcha to the suspicious
accounts!

~~~
greenleafjacob
They already do this but instead of a CAPTCHA they require a SMS. I don’t know
if they had the option to enter a CAPTCHA instead?

------
cfitz
Irrelevant to the content of the article, but I am such a fan of the direction
the NYT has taken with their interactive articles. Breaking up long-winded
articles via relevant images is no longer sufficient to maintain most readers'
attention. The NYT may just reach their 10 million subscriber goal [1] via
these very enjoyable (often scroll-triggered) animations and charts/graphics
and I hope they continue with these efforts.

[1] [https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-
interacti...](https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interactive-
news-desk-subscription-drive/)

~~~
tedmiston
I like it, but it's also a bit confusing. I use a read it later service
(Instapaper) to read articles from everywhere and interactive ones like this
tend to break it.

That in itself is okay, it's just that you don't realize it's broken unless
you open the full article and look for interactive bits.

~~~
alphakappa
I understand what you are getting at, but it's really a problem with
Instapaper. We shouldn't really expect NYTimes to not exploit the full power
of web technologies simply because read-it-later services may not present them
in the same way. The readers have to adapt to the content, and not the other
way around.

~~~
tedmiston
To some degree, yes, but then it's also a problem at Pocket, Evernote,
Readability, ReadKit, Safari Reading List, ...

If the content breaks all of their parsers and scrapers because it's tied up
in these custom dynamic components, then I wouldn't really expect all of the
parsers to handle that themselves. (Of course one pure text standard would be
nice.)

The bigger issue to me is that the omissions are silent.

~~~
untog
I think what we need is a standard packaging format that will allow services
to download interactive articles and all their dependencies easily. Then they
can just render it in a web view.

------
j-c-hewitt
The social media platforms are not 'struggling to respond.' They have ignored
the issue almost completely because it inflates their metrics and enables them
to over-bill advertisers. This in turn corrodes the trust that people have in
the web in general.

The prevalence of bots really puts stress on the whole idea that pageviews on
free websites are the same thing as subscribers to paid services. It is very
simple to mass manufacture fake views and fake users on free services. It is
not so simple to massively fabricate metrics around paying users.

~~~
themagician
They do combat it—but only just enough to keep the system in balance.

IMO they should completely ignore it. If they let the bots run completely wild
then like/follower/retweet/comment counts will all become completely useless
and probably disappear completely.

The internet was a better place before every piece of content had a number
associated with it. A number that serves no real purpose other than to
manipulate you into thinking it is more or less legitimate/important than you
would otherwise know at first glance.

------
DonHopkins
Looks like this story has already triggered an investigation by New York
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman!

"New York attorney general launches investigation into bot factory after Times
exposé. Louise Linton, Randy Bryce, and Clay Aiken all bought fake Twitter
followers from a company called Devumi."

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/1/27/16940426/e...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/1/27/16940426/eric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-twitter-times)

Eric Schneiderman @AGSchneiderman Retweeted The New York Times

Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law. We’re opening an
investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen
identities.

[https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312...](https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-
and-politics%2F2018%2F1%2F27%2F16940426%2Feric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-
twitter-times)

------
BadassFractal
It's been amusing to see fake follower buying explode on Instagram this last
few years in the photography / modeling space.

Photographers buy 50-100k fake followers, which you can easily see because
each one of their posts barely gets 200 likes, but people who don't check or
don't know how the game is played think you're a big deal. With your 100k
followers you can now reach out to models, who also bought a ton of followers
themselves, and you can work together because now you're at a similar level of
perceived clout, neither one of you is stepping down to collaborate with a
"nobody".

When you work together, you think you will get exposure to each other's fan
base, but in reality 95% of your followers are artificial, nobody wins in the
end. Maybe you get some insta-fame from regular people casually using IG who
have no idea how this stuff works.

You'll notice that brands rarely ever sponsor the type of people above because
every time they let them run a promotion nobody ends up buying their products
as a result of the shoutout. And that's because these people purchased their
digital fame, and fake followers don't have credit cards to buy flat tummy tea
or hair gummies or whatever they're peddling that day.

It's reminiscent of steroids, you probably wish you didn't have to take them,
but if you're going to be playing that specific game, you have to take them or
you'll be left out by those who do cheat.

Growing your instagram following organically these days is crazy hard. Both I
and people I know with all sorts of numbers are mostly seeing constant loss of
followers (fake accounts being taken down?) despite constant posting schedules
of quality content. Discoverability through hashtags is dead as far as I can
tell. It's reminiscent of trying to get big an an iOS app developer through
the App Store alone, it's just not going to happen anymore, it's not 2007.

People (specifically photographers) are looking for an alternative to IG, but
there's not one in sight. Ello is OK, but it's an artist circlejerk. 500px is
a botfest. Steemit seems interesting but it's also being overrun by garbage
content.

~~~
nradov
Why don't the fake followers automatically like those posts?

~~~
BadassFractal
It's actually a service that these companies offer, but it's significantly
more expensive over time since it's a continuous activity vs. a one time
thing. I imagine it's a lot more maintenance on their end.

It's one thing to have x fake accounts follow you once, but it's another thing
altogether to script the same x accounts to like every one of your posts every
time.

It's actually a downward spiral for people playing this game: you buy 100k
followers, not cheap, but you can take that hit once. However if you want to
look legit, you have to constantly pay for those accounts to like your posts,
which over months can add up to a really unpleasant bill. It's especially
unpleasant because none of those followers are monetizable, since they're not
real, and you're now on the hook to keep paying for likes in perpetuity, or
people might call you out.

It's a reason why often you will see the nouveau-famous influencers claim that
"IG shut down my account because my content was too saucy" as a way to save
face and stop paying for likes. In reality they closed the account themselves
and started from scratch because they could no longer afford the bill.

Again, most have no idea, watching this from the outside.

~~~
nradov
Thanks for clarifying. I had assumed it was all a big scam but didn't know
exactly how it worked.

------
flatline
These companies have sold investors on the value of their social graph. Nobody
was quite sure what, exactly, that value is, but it I think it is clear that
it has one.

Early on, celebrities organically grew followings. This gave them a direct,
bidirectional channel to their followers - there’s a value of the service,
more than the graph. Later arrivals to the platform had a problem, and so did
the service provider: how do you promote yourself to a broad subset of the
network, quickly?

Recommendation systems have been around for a long time, so that’s part of the
solution. But if you wanted a quick spin up, word of mouth and algorithmic
solutions weren’t going to go that far. And what if you had an unpopular brand
and we’re looking to improve it? Those things almost worked against you.
Deliberate promotion is another outlet, but people are looking for _viral_
magnification of their message. This is, I would argue, a real value to the
network. Spontaneous memetic propagation.

This is possibly the only real value of the network _at scale_. But you can’t
sell it, at least not directly. The appearance of deliberate, centralized
control does not yield the desired result. People can distinguish emergent
network behavior from facile promotion very easily, subconsciously even. The
value of the network is in social ties. So people whose friends genuinely like
something - they are more likely to like that thing, too.

If the _service provider_ is going to leverage the power of the network for
themselves, they _need_ these bot networks. They need to sell indirect access
to the network, because direct access is not the desired product. And the
network effect is very powerful, as we increasingly see isolated subgroups
creating virtual echochambers, and others paying to exploit and shape those
shape those sub graphs.

These networks are powerful and potentially dangerous artifacts. I think we
should have asked in 2009, could something like the Arab spring happen in a
developed, stable nation? But nobody was asking that, I certainly wasn’t. It
is a interesting time to be alive.

------
angarg12
The guy behind the top 1 restaurant in London on TripAdvisor said that he used
to write fake reviews.

Right now its not too difficult to identify patterns that tell real accounts
or comments from fake ones, but as AI learns to write better and create more
believable images and videos, I wonder how long it will take to create a bot
account indistinguishable from a real one.

Maybe this should be the Turing Test of our time.

~~~
akvadrako
It depends what you are looking for. A bot today might even have a real
insight, just by the luck of mixing two random points together. Just look at
the top picks of r/subredditsimulator.

But it won't be able to hold a longer conversation - that seems like a far
ways off.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
> A bot today might even have a real insight, just by the luck of mixing two
> random points together

When playing Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, and everyone puts
their best attempts in a pile, add a random card from the deck. In many of the
games I've played the deck wins by a long-shot.

------
RhodesianHunter
It's a little strange to me that this is news honestly. You've been able to go
on fiver and get fake followers for almost a decade now.

~~~
CM30
Yup. Almost every bit of 'trickery' people and companies use to promote
themself or their works has been a thing since the days of internet forums and
mailing lists. Whether that be sockpuppet accounts, fake reviews, fudging the
stats counters or anything else.

The only reason it's seen as some 'new' thing is because many journalists
seemingly didn't use the internet that much prior to the days of social media,
and like many people online seem to think a lot of patterns are newer than
they really are.

~~~
acdha
Or they’ve been using it for awhile and thought of the problem as the guys
posting blatant herbal viagra & work from home scams, not realizing that the
spammers weren’t just the bottom feeders any more.

------
mattgreenrocks
What if we all agreed that Internet points just don’t mean that much? It is
ridiculous that in my lifetime the general public flipped from “Internet is
for dweebs” to thinking numbers on a website are actually worth caring about.

~~~
gist
> if we all agreed that Internet

Who is the 'we' in that exactly? This is like saying 'what if we all agreed
that a fancy car or trappings of wealth don't mean anything' or 'what if we
all agreed that an Ivy Degree doesn't mean anything'? [1]

[1] I am offering some marketing help gratis for a wealth advisor today (side
project). I am going to tell her to buy a fancy car because it will work
better than the soccer mom vehicle she now drives in landing and impressing
clients that she is trying to tap. I don't need any research to prove that out
either. I know people respond to cues like this (I own said cars) so I know
it's a fair bet that 'we' is never going to get together and not care about
that type of thing. So it's an investment in marketing and advertising not a
cost of transportation. Now maybe you or hn readers don't think the same way
and it would sway you and you don't care. Doesn't matter. Enough people care
to make it a viable strategy. If I see a large amount of twitter followers I
might browse the first page or so and quickly determine how 'legit' they are.
But most people don't do that. They focus on the number only, right?

------
wstrange
What I don't get is how appropriating someone's persona and account details
(photo, etc) is not fraudulent?

I suppose it is hard to prove - since they purchased these profiles from
foreign entity. But surely Devumi knew many of these profiles were stolen from
real people without their consent.

------
gt_
The pseudocode in the article is a curious touch. I wonder where they're going
with this. You've gotta love the convenient 'when' statement.

~~~
desertrider12
I was wondering about that. It magically sets up an event handler and callback
with the next statement? Yes please.

------
Hasknewbie
It's pretty good that this kind of open secret gets coverage in the mainstream
media, but it's disappointing that this article contents itself with a bit of
celebrity shaming and only hammering on Twitter, probably because they're a
bit more transparent (technically speaking) and easier to take down.

Other networks (i.e. Facebook/Instagram) are probably just as bad, and if so
they are generating untold amount of ad revenue based on fake traffic and
accounts.

~~~
Spearchucker
Not sure the coverage will do any good anyway. First thing I did after reading
the Times piece was to see just how easy it is. Not only is it easy, it's
CHEAP! I paid GB £8 for 500 Instagram followers. Within 10 mintes I had just
shy of 1,000 new followers. So they under promise and over deliver, all the
while playing to people's ego. That buying followers is a thing does not
surpise me.

I wonder how many others bought followers in response to this article.

------
physicbits
It's sad that such dubious companies exists, but the saddest part is that
celebs are paying literally tons of money to keep themself 'uberfamous' while
these companies are counting the cash they just earned from them.

Even with newly created twitter accounts you get followers in like a day,
whereby some of them are fake accounts, mostly using erotic profile pictures
of some kind...

P.s. I like the NYT interactive articles, very nicely done with lots of
details.

~~~
BadassFractal
Everybody is in on it except for the casual folk, who I imagine make up the
vast majority of the user base and have no clue what's going on behind the
scenes.

------
zajd
Will Twitter ever handle this? Given how easily this journalist found this
pattern I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to start banning these accounts
with their internal metrics.

~~~
jdanp
Why would they want to do that? If they allow this to occur they can post
better growth numbers to their shareholders.

~~~
bringtheaction
Basic capitalistic economic theory says that you must seek to maximize profits
_long term_.

If you allow fake accounts to flourish, you tarnish your brand and hurt your
platform in the long term.

Of course, theory is one thing but the people in charge of making decisions
might have no motivation to prioritize the long term viability of the company
if they themselves don't really care about the company and the shareholders
but just want to extract maximum amounts of value for themselves...

~~~
coliveira
Yes, basic capitalistic economic theory is wrong. Many companies will do
whatever it takes to maximize short term profits, as long as they can
reasonably get away with that (i.e., not go to jail).

------
TomK32
Hey, reading the article made me realize there's space for a tool to clean out
all those bots from your follower list. People like @chefsymon who are now a
bit embarrassed by their previous acquisitions.

~~~
tedmiston
I just searched for tools like this out of curiosity. There are a few but they
all seem pretty sketchy, like only allowing one run or requesting dubious
twitter permissions to run an analysis that shouldn't require auth-ing at all.

------
hackandtrip
Devumi is a reseller. Services they use are near 0.1/1000 follower, even less,
with pool of 200k+ users per Services, 3/4 pools (just use Google, for
Facebook many are even real, collect tokens is fairly easy). And people that
sell these services at those prices, are reseller themselves using API to
control those bots, in really EVERY services you think about (even telegram);
revenue made by likes/etc may be really a small part, just think about the
power in elections + the the really small price

------
Invictus0
I don't care about people paying for extra followers. If that makes you feel
special, be my guest. What I very much do care about is these bots that are
being used by foreign nations and other bad actors to influence our national
conversations and even our cultural zeitgeist. To propose a variant on
Newton's third, for each powerful positive innovation, there is an equally
powerful negative consequence. I wonder what can be done to stop this.

~~~
coliveira
The US has being doing this for ages. The difference is that they used to pay
mainstream media people in foreign countries to spread their vision of the
world, and therefore poison the well of international news and commentary. Now
the US is tasting a little bit of that in the form of social media, which is
more polarized and difficult to control.

~~~
anigbrowl
That doesn't make it OK for the individual people who live with it. This idea
that it's somehow just payback for past bad actions by a government that most
of them weren't aware of is no help to regular folk who are drowning in a sea
of misinformation.

~~~
coliveira
This is not a justification, it is just an explanation of what is happening.
It is a well-known state of affairs throughout the world, where foreign powers
constantly jockey to spread political disinformation. Only now this is also
becoming reality inside the US because of changes in patterns of media
consumption spearheaded by companies such as FB and Google.

~~~
anigbrowl
Sorry for misreading your tone. You make a good point and I agree with your
objective assessment.

------
dredmorbius
Turns out Devumi's been shilling services on G+:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.goog...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.google.com/+Devumi/posts/BjW662pbwcd)

[https://plus.google.com/+Devumi](https://plus.google.com/+Devumi)

------
epx
I have found that my YouTube account, that has no intention of being famous
and had a couple followers, is now getting a constant trickle of new
subscribers every day, with funny names that look autogenerated. It may have
some relation with changes in YouTube monetization that will demand a minimum
number of subscribers. I hope my account will not be jeopardized by this.

------
jtbayly
What I'd like to know is what is the difference between paying an influencer
to tweet about your product with their account vs paying Devumi to tweet about
your product with their accounts?

Is the first any more legitimate?

~~~
jvagner
At the least, disclosure.

------
hwestiii
I was personally amused at the number of purchasers of these fake followers
"did not respond to request for comment"

------
pulisse
From the article: _Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities,
businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence
online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated
accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with
more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation
found._

------
matte_black
When any new social network arises, is it worth building up a network of fake
accounts on it?

------
Individualist
To this day maintain that social media is a failed experiment and should be
left behind in the dust for objective measurements.

~~~
askafriend
Social networking IS the Internet in many ways. It’s been a natural extension
of the Internet since the early days of forums and things like IRC.

To say social networking is a failed experiment is to say that the Internet is
a failed experiment - nonsense.

Now I think what you mean to say is that you don’t like the UX of algorithmic
feeds and firehose-style content/advertising. That’s fair.

But to write off social networking as a concept? That’s silly. The internet is
so powerful because it is social.

~~~
akjetma
The internet is inherently social, we don't need to reify that aspect in
explicit sites for 'social networking'. It's a weird cargo-culty skeumorphism
of a natural thing. I think we need maybe point-to-point and broadcast comm
standards but not social networking sites that try to trap you and own you

------
ink404
Love Adam Ferris's work -- he did the collages at the start of this piece,
highly recommend checking out his website [1]

[1]:[https://adamferriss.com/](https://adamferriss.com/)

~~~
gt_
Is that you, Adam Ferris?

~~~
justinwp
just a bot

~~~
TomK32
beep

~~~
ink404
bloop

~~~
DonHopkins
You should have signed up for Old Glory Robot Insurance!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno)

------
yvsong
Is there an executive summary of the article?

~~~
tedmiston
Upvoting you because this was a long read.

My summary - There are a lot of twitter users with fake followers. This
company, Devumi, behind selling fake followers claims they're not really fake
because they buy the followers on an influencer marketplace so they're "real"
to the buyer (obviously seems questionable). Some people have their social
identities stolen which are in turn used to create these fake profiles. Lots
of celebrities, athletes, and other famous people have bought fake followers —
some directly, others through marketing agencies, and others possibly
completely without their knowledge. Most people that the NYT called out denied
having knowledge of the purchase of fake followers or blamed a rogue employee.
The bots interact in rings with each other so their activity patterns are
detectable with analysis. Twitter is not necessarily incentivized to solve the
problem because there are probably some bots it has not detected and considers
real active users. The founder of the company lists a fake address as
residence and fake university degrees as credentials.

It is a long read, but the article has several interactive features that keep
it interesting.

