
Identifying a Large Number of Fake Followers on Instagram - wnstnsmth
https://srfdata.github.io/2017-10-instagram-influencers/
======
anrmq7
Fake followers and fake engagement are widespread on Instagram - much more
prolific than advertisers realize. I’ve worked with “influencers” for years.
In the past few months brands, advertisers and agencies I speak to are voicing
their concern. So, I'm helping build a product (based on analysis of 80
million profiles so far) which will allow brands steer clear of fake
influencers, e.g. those women being paid $X/month to walk around NYC and
promote handbags/yoga clothes/etc. based on the 50k fake followers they've
bought from some website.

~~~
FilterSweep
> based on the 50k fake followers they've bought from some website. This, and
> its not just limited to buying fake followers.

There is an effect with _real_ followers unintentionally following pages by
either churn&burn or clickfarms, as well.

Facebook has this occur more widespread. The churn n' burn goes as follows: 1)
Build Meme or image sharing page, 2) Accrue 50K+ followers, 3) Sell page to an
influencer, influencer updates pictures and profile 4) Followers of old page
have no idea the influencer they're following, and now see ads mixed in with
the old content.

All and all, the overinflation in that industry is reaching bubble levels, if
it hasn't already passed it.

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technotarek
I can't help but think of the movie the Big Short. There's a large pool of
social media marketers, influencers and other tangentially related businesses,
all in some way propped up by this fake activity. They're not unlike all the
hands that got involved in the mortgage business and securitizing of sub-par,
high risk loans. If only there was a way to "short" the Instagram industry.

p.s. To those debating what constitutes a "fake" account, don't forget that
the term was only recently invented: [https://www.avclub.com/merriam-webster-
points-out-that-trump...](https://www.avclub.com/merriam-webster-points-out-
that-trump-didnt-invent-fak-1819298951)

~~~
have_faith
Similarly, I caught some non-technical friends recommending some other friends
that they should buy into bitcoin / altcoins as an easy way to make money,
reminded me of the same film.

~~~
nrhk
Well they haven't been wrong yet, just doubled in the last month.

Regardless these are all small bubbles that will only have localized effects
when they collapse. Much more important bubbles to worry about like the
derivatives market.

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ringaroundthetx
Their definition of fake is too limited, and they ackowledge that and then
rely on it anyway because there isn't an agreed upon definition of fake.

That is very strange, given that there are already better ways to determine if
the accounts "will provide value to advertisers", and that is by raising the
bar a bit more to look at the account's recent likes and activity.

just because an account has less than 10 posts or is private doesn't mean that
they aren't actively engaged humans. that is the root flaw of this analysis.

~~~
ivan_gammel
I think the classification can still be supported by the analysis of the
behavior of these accounts and the other statistics on the accounts of
"influencers" with high ratio of fake accounts. For example, the latter tend
to have significantly higher than average ratio of likes to followers on their
recent publications. Also, purchases of followers usually happen in batches,
so it is easy to observe the spikes in followers numbers. The behavior of
"like" bots also produces some observable patterns.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
> Also, purchases of followers usually happen in batches, so it is easy to
> observe the spikes in followers numbers.

I would disagree with this. It is very easy to have a steady stream of
followers on instagram, I've run a few campaigns myself.

When an account is private, and promoted, instagram queues up follower
requests to 100 at a time, and you can't see how many are queued but you can
predict how many users have been attracted to the account. Bot accounts or
otherwise.

(Note: this is part of a larger strategy of getting instagram's algorithm to
self-promote your posts in the explore section, or as popular in a hashtag. As
you can post something new and your new followers will like your post and then
you can switch your account public soon after and it is boosted in activity on
many feeds, attracting more people to your account)

The user - who is the influencer - account can manually approve the pending
followers, or take their account public. When taking the account public, 100
pending followers are added automatically, and it has to be switched back to
private to show the next pending followers, only for them to be added when the
account is toggled to public yet again. If the account stays public, the other
pending followers will stay pending indefinitely and the user can't see that
they are pending.

Therefore, this gives the account the ability to control a steady growth of
followers, 100 at a time, indefinitely. If they keep the account private
during their actual campaign. The authors might be surprised that this
strategy obtains more humans than bots.

The main thing here is that there are many ways to "buy followers". And I
think the analysis here assumes way too much about a single way that followers
are bought. The authors have probably never created their own influencer
account, to know about the infrastructure that really exists.

~~~
nsomaru
Could you share more thoughts about the larger strategy of post and hashtag
promotion? Interested to hear your experiences, as we've been dabbling in some
FB and Instagram marketing.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
On instagram, It is easy for an account to come out of nowhere in hashtag
promotion.

Just like I was explaining it can basically bake in followers while private.
An account can go from 0 - 10,000, or 20,000 pending followers almost
overnight, but more practically in a week's time. This won't register on any
analytics site.

The account can accept as many of the new followers as it likes (this takes
time though) and can make a new post and stack it with hashtags while private.
The post will begin getting a lot of likes in a short time span, and then the
profile can go public.

For maximum efficiency, this should still be in conjunction with at least one
other campaign, still funneling new followers in while the account is public.
The post will go to the popular section of every hashtag except the most
popular hashtags, as well as trend in the explore section for many users who
don't follow you yet.

Given the way that campaigns work, using stories and tags in photos, these
should mostly be human followers.

------
jaclaz
>Secondly we are suprised by the high number of fake followers in the
business. Almost a third of 7 million followers of Swiss influencers appear to
be fake. About 30 of the analyzed influencers appear to have more than 50%
fake followers. Among those are quite some who advertise products of smaller
and larger Swiss companies on a regular basis.

So, in a country (with all due respect) hardly "at the center of the universe"
for (say) design, fashion, and similar with approximately 8.5 million people,
115 "influencers" have 8.5 million followers.

Even taking into consideration foreigners (after all it is the internet and it
is "global"), is it a surprise that a large part of them are "fake"?

~~~
fwn
The US has a population of roughly 323 million. @katyperry, @justinbieber,
@BarackObama, and @taylorswift13 have 387 million followers. What does that
tell us?

Nothing. As you say, the internet is global.

~~~
jaclaz
Well, I find hard to believe (remember that this is limited to Instagram and
to "market influencers", none of the ones mentioned are rock stars, presidents
of the US, etc. that I believe have a more transversal audience) that the
total amount of followers is so large.

The intended audience seems to me pretty much "narrow" at least from the few
examples given on the article under "Illustrative examples of Swiss Instagram
influencers".

These are seemingly all fashion related, targeted to an audience (my personal
estimate) of women in the 16-40 years old range, maybe even a more restricted
age range.

And Switzerland is not - I believe - considered an international (worldwide)
reference for fashion.

Of course my reasoning is based not on any data, so it may be well off, but I
would have expected an even higher number of "fake" followers, not a smaller
one than what the researchers found.

------
beepboopbeep
It's amazing to me that more of this hasn't taken place. With valuations being
driven by total # of users, where is the due diligence to verify these claims?

~~~
eanzenberg
Valuation is more-so driven by ARPU so all this does is shift ARPU up.

Also, there are network effects. It's unknown whether Instagram would be a
better service (to investors) if all (half, a quarter, etc.) fake accounts
were removed.

~~~
sharkmerry
If they know numbers are inflated falsely, arent they duping advertisers than?
If using CPM and 50% of impressions are fake, that halves their revenue.
Facebook, Twitter, etc, all the same

~~~
eanzenberg
I can't speak for instagram facebook etc. but the industry is continuing to
move away from cost per impression (which can be duped by fake accounts) to
cost per "action", where action happens further down the funnel (registration,
28-day retention, in-app-purchase, etc.)

~~~
eric_h
Yeah - we worked with a company that bought some traffic on a cost per
impression basis relatively recently, and all of a sudden we had a significant
burst in errors being reported.

The user agent for the devices experiencing the errors were all an old version
Firefox.

Turns out that version of Firefox was the default for some version of
Selenium, and all of that traffic was coming from bots running in data
centers.

Moral of the story, don't buy cost per impression from any company with
anything but the best reputation, because that market is saturated with bots.

------
bennesvig
It's easy to tell on an individual basis if an Instagram account has something
screwy going on.

\- Check comments to followers ratio. \- Check comment quality (are people
tagging friends or leaving generic/spam "great pic" comments?). \- Follow the
account and turn on post notifications. By doing this you'll see how many
spammy ads they post then delete an hour later. Many of these posts will have
fake social proof on them.

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neves
The first fake account is impressive because it links to a real Facebook
account. Don't they have any kind of verification?

~~~
wnstnsmth
They don't say that "fake" followers have to be bots - they could also be
humans that "sell" their profile to platforms so they can re-sell it again for
following. If you buy "quality" followers on buzzoid.com, for example, you get
exactly that. Accounts that appear to be real people - and are probably - but
who follow several thousand of other profiles. And that is just weird.

------
KekDemaga
Alternative idea for a service: Identify other “influencers” in your market
niche and buy them thousands of obviously fake followers, when in discussions
with advertisers point this out: "X has more followers, that is true, but look
at the quality of them most of these are obvious bots. That is why my rates
are 20% higher."

