
The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business - diego
http://www.barracudalabs.com/wordpress/?p=2989
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kanamekun
There's a real advantage to buying Twitter followers that isn't highlighted in
the article.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your follower base is to follow
people and hope that they follow you back. But you can only follow 2k people
with a new account before Twitter's anti-(follow)spam algoritms kick in and
prevent you from following more.

However if you have more than 2k followers, then you are allowed to follow
more than 2k accounts. Twitter actually allows you to follow 10% more people
than you have following you... so if you have 10k accounts following you, you
can go ahead and follow 11k account. That means you can followspam 11k
accounts instead of just 2k.

So by buying fake followers, you greatly increase your ability to follow-spam
on Twitter. And this technique yields (mostly) real followers. So in short: if
it's part of a followspam campaign, buying fake followers is an efficient way
to grow your followership much more rapidly.

All that said, I'm not a fan of this technique for many reasons. For starters,
it's so unfair to watch other people buy followers and aggressively followspam
while you play by the rules. But so many people do it, so the pressure on
everyone to achieve these sorts of results is immense. It's vaguely
reminiscent of baseball in the 90s: everyone else is breaking home run
records, so it's easy to be tempted to try steroids. Also, as a casual user of
the site: it's not fun to be followed by so many new accounts that magically
have 10k fake followers and are aggressively followspamming to build up real
followers.

I hope that Twitter cracks down on this unfair practice, and better polices
their system against abuse. In the meantime, just wanted to point out that
this abuse is more than just a hack to buy social proof... it's a marketing
loophole for Twitter spammers as well.

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paulsilver
This fits in with something I came across last year. A client had been sold on
promoting their site using social media by someone at a web agency they
trusted. I took a look through their followers after having some suspicions
about the advice of the expert about something else. As far as I could tell,
three-quarters of the followers of this company were fake. They only had about
400-500 followers, so nothing like the numbers mentioned in the article, but a
pretty useful amount at the time.

I wasn't sure if the client company were aware most of their followers didn't
really exist. I was trying to work out how we'd broach it with them when we
were dumped off our bit of the project. I couldn't work out what all the fake
followers were for, I presumed at the time it was just to make it look like
the social media guy was doing his job well and it was all going well, when in
reality he was just buying followers in. The idea he was trying to bring in
more natural followers by having a big follower count at least means he could
have been acting more ethically than I thought.

Given updates in Google over the last couple of years to make social signals
more and more important, it could be a lot of people buying likes, fake
followers and retweets are just trying to influence the rankings of the
company/page mentioned in Google's search results by showing a lot of social
activity about that company.

If this is the case, the abuse will continue and probably get much worse until
either Twitter cracks down on it or Google dial back on how strongly it takes
signals from Twitter. Unfortunately, given how much blog spamming there still
is, even after everyone started using 'nofollow' on comment links, it may not
make much difference to the level of abuse. Lots of people spend time trying
to manipulate Google in ways much of the SEO industry believe don't work any
more.

Given this, it'll be up to Twitter to stop the abuse, and as it makes their
service look busy and popular, they potentially aren't going to be interested
in being too aggressive on blocking fake accounts, unless they're being very
obviously abusive. Personally, I still get plenty of accounts following me
which have just started, then spewed spam links to people for days, and
Twitter hasn't worked on a way to automatically shut them down (although it
seems to happen pretty quickly after I use the Block facility to report them.)
So I can't see that they're going to get around to shutting down harder to
notice fake accounts very quickly either. Not until it becomes a large enough
problem that the mainstream press starts complaining about it.

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davecap1
I noticed the trend of buying followers a while ago and a couple of weeks ago
I built <http://twitteraudit.com> which simply looks at 5000 followers and
uses a few simple metrics to guess whether a user is real or fake.

TwitterAudit gives a single score of the percentage of any user's followers
that are real. Most people are above 40%, but some are below 10%, suggesting
that they probably bought a lot of them.

Check it out! Any feedback would be great.

~~~
citricsquid
Ah, sweet site. I had started building something similar myself a few weeks
back (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315669>) I'm using yours now to
check a few accounts I know of that buy followers.

It would be nice if I could pay to run a few audits at once.

Edit: so I played around with it for a bit, a problem it seems to have is it
doesn't cope with Twitter "lurkers", people that don't tweet much, follow lots
of people and have a few followers. You shouldn't count those that follow ~200
people but don't tweet much as "fake". You should assume that every user with
under 1-200 followings is legitimate, because it's not cost effective for the
follower sellers to do it with accounts with so few follows. or at the very
least have their "score" very low.

~~~
davecap1
Thanks for the feedback. The site is actually quite lenient with the follower
type you mention.. but maybe it's not lenient enough! I'll look into it.

~~~
citricsquid
Here's a few people that it reports that have high amounts of "fake"
followers, which I know don't purchase followers:

<http://twitteraudit.com/notch> <http://twitteraudit.com/marc_irl>
<http://twitteraudit.com/redstonewire>

Their followers are a lot of Twitter "lurkers".

~~~
joshu
I did mine. 25k followers: <http://www.twitteraudit.com/joshu> \- I definitely
don't buy followers, because who cares?

There are a LOT of follow robots out there. Fake followers that follow lots of
people, hoping to get followed back. If you don't, they unfollow.

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piffey
Can anyone explain what the benefit is of having hundreds of useless
followers? Is there some reputation system on Twitter I'm missing?

~~~
diego
All else being equal, people are more likely to follow people who already have
lots of followers: there must be something good about their tweets that makes
all those people choose to keep following them.

The number of followers is the only visible indicator of the "goodness" of an
account. It's similar to karma on Hacker News, except that it's impossible to
miss because it's prominently displayed. This is probably intentional on the
part of Twitter, to grow their network.

<http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2010/02/on_karma.html>

~~~
grabeh
Is the quality of the tweets on a particular account not also a visible
indicator of the 'goodness' of that account?

~~~
brk
Which one is easier to make a short-attention span decision on:

1) This person has made 1000 tweets, let me read them all in order to gauge my
opinion of them.

2) OH LOOK, 5,000 FOLLOWERS! Must follow popular person!

~~~
grabeh
Of course you are right but the suggestion was that the latter was the only
visible indicator which is obviously not the case.

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dchuk
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You
don't wanna know about it, believe me."

This has been going on basically since Twitter was created, it's such an easy
platform to game at every single level, from account creation to posting to
gaining new followers. Look at all the users out there with ~500 follower
differences between who they're following and who is following them...it's all
automated.

~~~
dpeck
Two things, first account creation is fairly difficult to game. Theres ways to
do it, but it requires either quite a bit of manual interaction or some above
average technical skills at this point, correct?

Second, those users are the easiest to detect. A previous report the team put
out identified high friend/follow ratios as a tip off, but any decent bot is
going to work the follow-> hope for follow back -> unfollow if not churn to
build up their numbers, look more legitimate, etc.

Disclaimer: the post was written by a member of my team, and I've done some
work on our social network monitoring previously and continue to.

~~~
dchuk
as someone who has successfully built undetectable bots for a large number of
sites, including twitter, I can assure you, it's not that difficult to game
(so long as you have the right skillset, which I agree with what I think
you're saying here in saying that not many have those skills).

Even if only a handful of people have those skills, they can still do quite a
bit in terms of spitting out massive amounts of real looking accounts.

If a user can do it in a browser, it can be automated.

~~~
dpeck
Yeah, I think we're on the same page.

After doing PoC for that sort of thing the number of easily detectable bots
are a bit annoying that they don't put in the relatively trivial amount of
effort to make them appear as a real user, but I guess if they're able to get
some money in your pocket with that level of effort, more power to them.

~~~
dchuk
ha yeah, I definitely agree. It's amazing how the threshold for quality is
with spammers/hackers/script kiddies...a little goes a long way with that kind
of stuff

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mot0rola
Interesting tidbit there about Mitt Romney's account. Nice investigative
journalism.

~~~
gbog
I found that the part about Romney, which I do not know about and do not
necessarily want to know about, gave me the feeling that the article was
written with a political agenda. Then much of my interest vanished.

~~~
olatief
He says in the article that there's no authentication for buying followers and
mentions the possibility of Mitt Romney's new "followers" being paid for by
his opponents.

~~~
1337biz
This has actually potential. Faking the opponent's social media
followers/likes and "informing" the media about it could become a new tool in
the dirty campaigning tactics arsenal

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capex
There are plenty of people selling twitter followers on <http://fiverr.com>

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dsirijus
Plenty money to be made around with it. Just take a look at this search.
<http://www.freelancer.com/search/twitter/> Someone with tight insfrastructure
of bots, automatic fake user sets, fb pages taken over during the non-existing
admin fiasco can do these tasks with few clicks.

That being said, business is not booming as it used to back in, say, 2009. And
not nearly as booming as with Facebook likes.

Disclaimer: I am not engaged in such practices, but have dealt with it.

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Zaheer
This isn't unique to Twitter, in fact if you go to fiverr.com you'll find many
people selling Instagram followers as well. The people that sell these
followers have programmed bots to go around liking and following a bunch of
people in effect advertising their service.

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ricksta
It doesn't look like it's very hard to detect these fake users. Is Twitter
actively cracking down on these or do they not care much?

~~~
abhaga
They seem to be identifying and banning active bots. I don't think they worry
about fake accounts that just sit around and follow others without generating
a lot of tweets.

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Axsuul
Another reason why I think App.net has potential.

~~~
activepeanut
How is app.net going to prevent his?

~~~
ujal
A paywall will do it. Thats where most of the users currently in see the
value. They will probably change their current goals and become a svbtle
equivalent in 140 chars. Elitist networks are in and one can easily see why.
_Yes, shameless speculation here._

