The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business | Hacker News Reader

The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business

barracudalabs.com

81 pointsdiego33 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Nicely done!

Feature request: show a list of the fake followers for one's account.

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

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

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

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!

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

Humans are sheep. They follow each other. People see a crowd and go to see what's going on.

You can test it. Create a small crowd in any high street, stand back and what it grow.

Adding to what the other said:

1. Some people get paid for sponsored tweets. The more followers you have, the better chances to get sponsored tweets and get paid more

2. Some accounts belong to websites. These webmasters get lots of followers and show to potential advertisers how popular they are.

3. To game search engines

4. To get some cash when selling the Twitter account with or without associated website

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I thought it was interesting ... if there was any arena where social media is ripe for abuse it is the political one. The graph definitely makes things look suspect.

Of course, that doesn't mean the Romney campaign is behind it -- they could be, or it could be some fervent supporters, or, as the article points out, even his opponents designed to make him look bad.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Another reason why I think App.net has potential.

How is app.net going to prevent his?

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.

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