Someone bought my Twitter account 10K fake/bot followers

https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/when-bots-attack-af7f9f87b612

by esnard • 8 years ago

143 48 8 years ago

Havoc2• 8 years ago

That's actually a really clever way of investigating the "fake" eco-system...buy it and crunch the numbers of what you now know are confirmed fakes.

dswalter• 8 years ago

What you describe, buying followers to analyze them, is exactly what Erin Shellman did back in 2015.

http://www.erinshellman.com/bot-or-not/

nitrogen• 8 years ago

confirmed fakes

Does anybody ever sell hacked accounts or accounts where people gave some random app way too many permissions?

Jemmeh3• 8 years ago

Yes but not so much for this in particular. If I want to make a bunch of fake Twitter followers I would just generate new accounts and generate some fake tweets. It would take a lot more work to hack someone's account (who then might also notice it's hacked and try to take it back).

App permissions can still be a problem, but usually that is usually centered more around identity theft.

Havoc2• 8 years ago

I doubt it scales. Probably easier to just sign up for additional accounts

Unlike credit cards they're not worth much so less incentive to hijack the real deal

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

One of my Twitter accounts that I was using only as an OAuth provider started tweeting spam. So yes, this does happen.

tjwds• 8 years ago

"I am certain that my account was 'maliciously [targeted by] someone with bot followers to make [me] look bad.'"

Imagine explaining this concept to someone five years ago, let alone ten or twenty, and trying not to come across as bad science fiction.

hartator• 8 years ago

Newspapers buying themselves is not something new.

jobigoud2• 8 years ago

Or authors buying copies of their own book to kickstart themselves into the best seller club.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316...

jpindar• 8 years ago

Twitter doesn't seem much different to me now than it did five years ago except that US politics is getting mentioned more. The idea that some people have fake followers and that makes them look bad isn't new.

maaaats• 8 years ago

A year or so ago, it was trending in Norway to post that you would donate 1kr (~.1usd) per like, and then challenge your friends to do the same. I bought a friend thousand likes for a few bucks.

So in essence, I donated 100usd for about 10usd, haha

wila• 8 years ago

My desire to maintain a clean/legit Twitter following was driven by necessity. I didn’t want to lose out on any work because of the appearance that I was falsely representing my reach/influence.

Run a twitter follower list API call for all followers with the quality filter on. Save the list to a database

Then run the same call with a the quality filter off and tag each new follower as a bot.

Then block the bots ?

Of course I realize that he's not a developer, but that would basically fix his problem and is not too hard to create.

edit: I now saw at twitteraudit.com that you can use it to block followers too. I guess that he didn't mind THAT much then contrary to the quoted statement above.

saas_co_de• 8 years ago

The thing is that Twitter can detect bots very easily. They choose not to because they are desperate to keep their numbers up.

aiCeivi9• 8 years ago

If they ever do, they will be people trying to weaponize it. It reminds me of old email spam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job

simias• 8 years ago

I'm not sure how that would work in the context of Twitter. Spoofing an email sender is trivial (well, it was before SPF, DKIM and friends). On Twitter the equivalent would be to make an account behave like a bot so that it got flagged but I don't see how you could do that without getting its credentials.

Shoothe• 8 years ago

I just searched for "buy Twitter followers" and it seems 10000 followers cost only $40: https://www.socialshop.co/twitter/buy-twitter-followers/

It's funny looking at the page with various packs, just like a normal service: "express delivery", "high quality"!

blakesterz• 8 years ago

This was way more interesting than I thought it would be.

"This is neither a bug nor isolated to my account. Twitter’s entire platform is propped up by misleading/inflated follower/following counts, which include accounts Twitter themselves have identified as “suspected spam accounts” (and have been identified as such for years)."

I never knew that Twitter did that “suspected spam accounts” accounts thing.

Also... he calls this an "attack", which seems like the wrong word to use somehow. They bots don't seem to be attacking him, they just follow him. Probably doesn't matter much, but I kept waiting for an "attack" to happen, but then it became obvious they're just following him.

monsieurbanana• 8 years ago

I think attack is perfectly appropriate. Having 10k of obviously fake accounts following you is a massive hit to your reputation.

loceng2• 8 years ago

Why have follower count anyway, I'm perfectly happy not knowing if someone with a username of monsieurbanana is a regularly commenter with a huge following or not; I know you can look at a profile to get an idea of someone's participation, participation count is a much more important or useful metric anyhow.

ryanlol2• 8 years ago

Having 10k of obviously fake accounts following you is a massive hit to your reputation.

What sort of people do you hang out with?

zxlk21e3• 8 years ago

I'd be more embarrassed for writing on Forbes. do you have any idea how easy it is to get an article on there? $100 will buy a guest post from a ton of contributors, normally done for SEO value or fake PR landscape.

fwgwgwgch• 8 years ago

This is much more blatant in my country- India.

Rich no-name dudes get themselves a birthday trend (sometimes worldwide) albeit briefly. Given that Twitter has personnel manually looking at trends it shouldn't be hard for them to immediately kill that trend. I've often seen them go on for hours and started by accounts which follow the standard bot template in their bio.

Of course of this were a trend about wiki leaks twitter is quick to suppress. I know people in the US like to pick political sides but they're slowly "progressing" themselves towards 1984 by supporting this.

yorby• 8 years ago

and here I was thinking we were already experiencing 1984 (maybe even a bit worst)

circa• 8 years ago

How much did he sell it for? As people mention you can buy a lot of fake followers for cheap. I do like a lot of the data here though.

Rotdhizon• 8 years ago

This is nothing in the grand scheme of social media account selling/trading. Go to any social media account marketplace and look through, you can buy any of the thousands of accounts that are for sale. People will spend literally thousands of dollars on accounts that have "original" handles, think dictionary defined one word handles. Then you have people who will spend money on accounts that have thousands of fake followers, because of how easy it is to game these platforms for views and followers. In my eyes it really ruins the fun of cool handles, because people are literally making livings off of scoping up as many of these accounts as they can and reselling them.

Want to get karma on reddit? Go to one of the endless amount of subs dedicated to karma farming and make clickbait posts. Turn around and sell the account to any of the political trolls that love to harvest those accounts.

Want to get followers on twitter/facebook/instagram/xbox/psn? Set your profile picture to that of any model you can find, claim it's you, then post nothing but clickbait and fake giveaway promotions. Turn around and sell it to the low self esteem teenagers who crave internet attention because they can't get it irl.

Granted you don't see much youtube account selling, I'd say mostly because since the platform is so old, a majority of the original account handle owners are long gone from the platform. You do still see it in some aspect though, especially on Fortnite channels. A bunch of seemingly original account names come out of nowhere and get a few hundred k subs in a short spam by posting clickbait fortnite vids? Not a coincidence. Most of those accounts are bought.

Then you have people who lurk through platforms and try an harvest as many original accounts as they can. I'm not sure how they do it, maybe just guessing?

The people who sell these accounts know how desperate some people are for them, that's why so much effort goes in to collecting these accounts. Just look at what happened with the xbox gamertag refresh, that was a disaster. What was meant to be an opportunity for anyone to get a cool gt,turned into bots harvesting thousands of accounts within seconds of them being released, then sold off.

A driving factor behind this behavior is that their is no effort to stop this. Instagram I believe tried to crack down, but what can you do really? You can't be suspicious of various IPs logging in, that's normal behavior even when it's truly malicious. The only way I can think to catch the selling of accounts would be to have an AI look at the behavior and flag drastic changes. Have an account that's normally on a west coast USA IP that posts cute cat photos that suddenly has a Europe location IP and it flooding its feed with clickbait? Probably a new owner.

In reality though, the amount of people who care about this is very minimal. It's a small niche of that consists of mostly teenagers/young adults who grew up in the digital/video game centric age. The need to impress others by having a cool online identity is paramount here.

EDIT: To give examples, I should include some prices. Want a 1 letter instagram account? It'll run you between $10,000-$50,000 if you can find someone selling. Want a 2 letter twitter handle? it'll cost you a few hundred/thousand depending on the letters. Want a two letter xbox gt? it'll cost you a few thousand. Want an original gmail account? It'll cost a few thousand. 3 letter accounts of most of the social media platforms range from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on if it's actually a word, looks cool, or if it's just a random assortment of characters and letters.

jobigoud2• 8 years ago

Granted you don't see much youtube account selling

YouTube (and Twitch) have the "view bot" problem though, where you can buy views (viewbotting) for a video to make it appear popular.

geektips• 8 years ago

I had a facebook page which had 4K followers, it around 2 years to reach that much people. But one day the page likes Jumped to 12K ,It was targeted by a guy to make us look bad. I lost interest after this knowing that my audience are fake bots.

teslacar• 8 years ago

Buying followers is a good idea actually. There are fewer restrictions on Twitter accounts that have a lot of followers.

CharlesW• 8 years ago

It's not because your engagement/user goes down (unless you now also start paying for fake engagement).

dbt00• 8 years ago

To play devil's advocate briefly, assume that Twitter decided to delete all accounts it flagged as spam/bot accounts tomorrow. What would the long term fallout be? It's unlikely that people selling follower counts would simply go away, just become a more active adversary. By putting bots simply behind a quality filter (a pseudo shadow-ban), they avoid an escalating arms race in bot account creation.

The real fix here is to stop showing follower counts completely, since they're trash.

pietroglyph• 8 years ago

This really just seems like a poorly implemented shadow-ban system (although intentional user count inflation wouldn't surprise me either.)

leereeves• 8 years ago

Except follower counts motivate active users to stay on Twitter. For some people, Twitter is a social game and follower counts are the score.

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

Plus advertisers need some tangible metrics in order to distribute their ads (and the $ that comes with it).

If followers would cease to exist, half of the emptiness/vanity accounts would also cease to exist (and that is not a bad thing imho).

zxlk21e3• 8 years ago

It's very unlikely someone bought them for him to make him look bad. Instead, a lot of the time when fake followers are created they are programmed to look 'normal' by following other accounts and engaging. Otherwise a single follow target can be a real outlier and easier to triangulate.

source: worked in spam for a long time.

Also, 10k accounts is like $5-$10 for most 'in the business'. There are a lot of services that sell for this upwards of $50-$100 though. We're not talking about a lot of investment.

danso• 8 years ago

Why do you think it so unlikely? In the media world, some people faced career-damage after the NYT expose:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-ric...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/journalists-struggle-ex...

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

I don't think they're saying it never happens, but I've heard similar reports to OC.

It's a measure taken to normalize the accounts— it muddies the water. That way, they look more like average personal accounts than obviously paid-for followers. The costs on the click-farm side is averaged out so they just have the "clickers" or bots follow a huge variety of people and companies while also putting the most backing to the accounts belonging to whoever hired them.

gaoshan2• 8 years ago

I saw this title and promptly went and bought a thousand for my daughter. I anticipate much squealing and confused "I'm trending!" hollering.

Buttons840• 8 years ago

And thus, your daughter's brain begins to see the pattern that leads to true fulfillment, having lots of online followers. ;)

gaoshan2• 8 years ago

Oh she's already there. I hope this shows her how pointless they really are. If she looks into her new followers she will see a bunch of odd sounding names that all follow roughly the same number of people and have no posts so it's pretty clear something is going on.

AlwaysRock• 8 years ago

A few years ago when I realized this was possible I bought myself, a few friends from high school / college, and a few small companies I like a bunch of followers. (50K each roughly)

For me it was mostly so people would ask how I got so many followers and I could tell the silly story. Buying them for my friends was fun because they would end up tweeting about it and I could watch them try to figure it out before telling them. For the small companies I actually knew the CEO/CTO's and ended up talking about it later on. They came out the best because their accounts were flooded with fake followers but after people saw they had 50K followers real people started following them. I believe one of the companies is close to 150K followers now. If only a third of that is real it's still a lot more than they would have had before.

I looked recently and it seems to be more difficult to do now.

Someone bought my Twitter account 10K fake/bot followers

Related Stories