That's What He Said - Latest Comments in The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

PB Solution GmbH — Sun, 06 May 2012 05:43:47 -0000

Really Thanks for this analysis! Retweetet your Post!
See You

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

12345shop — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:10:42 -0000

nice post

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Carnavaloke — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:21:49 -0000

its great

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

afallison — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:14:33 -0000

I'm just now really getting my feet wet with disqus. I am really loving the way it integrates with twitter and the other web 2.0 social platforms. ;)

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Rosana Hemann — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:31:29 -0000

Brooks, you are absolutely right. @ev is wrong and did not understand how serious the matter is. Someone has really created a script that skips the captcha, creates ghosts accounts and adds 20 personalities to follow. The names are all combinations of a giant random name list, which is here:
http://www.archive.org/stre...

Two profiles in Brazil are being followed and have added 60 thousand fake followers. All of them follow the same pattern, already mentioned: 0 or 1 post, zero followers, following 20 people or so, default or sexy avatars.

This is causing a distortion in all Twitter statistics, because there are MILLIONS of ghost profiles being added. This is also changing the rankings all over the world. And generating faulty articles on newspapers.

I don`t understand why Twitter, and @ev and @jack are pretending this is not happening.

@dansalles a major programmer in Brazil has written about ir and reported it to Twitter but, so far, got no answer.

@rosana
@dansalles

If any of you wish to contact us, we'll be delighted to show some more evidence on this bot adding machine.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Dona Bogart — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:05:20 -0000

Good catch Jason and good detective work Brooks!

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

AtticManTrader — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:34:27 -0000

Interesting stuff. I've been on Twitter a couple of weeks and I'm currently impressed by how sociable and honest it seems. I've not come across any unpleasantness (like some of the forums I've been contributing to for a while). I guess there was always going to come a time when people worked on ways of abusing Twitter - simply because its so powerful. I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of being followed by fake accounts actually is (maybe I'm not devious enough?)
Personally, I'd like to see a tool that allows me to ask a question like
"Find me all the day traders in London, that follow Mr x, have 30+ followers themselves with a follow/following ratio of between 0.7 and 1.3 - and follow them.
If you wanted to build a useful list of followers, this type of functionality would be great!

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Barrie — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:35:59 -0000

Twitter is whacked.
It's so gamed you can't trust any of the stats it spits out, and the service is so faulty it's not worth trusting.

And in the capricious courts of internet popularity, Twitter is well on the way to becoming "so yesterday", that the growing perception is being a dork just to use it.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

michaelroark — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:37:23 -0000

It would be nice if the suggested users were derived from some input interests or maybe a keyword box you had an option to fill out when signing up.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

grant guthrie — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:04:39 -0000

While the suggested users tab has been around since mid January or so, do we know when it was added to the registration process? Was it Feb. 11 by any chance? Just a theory.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Lina — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:10:31 -0000

I'm very new to Twitter, and came here several days ago. Thank you for this very valuable information. I'm going to revew each person who ia following me.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

vetmomof2 — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:19:58 -0000

Interesting! Can someone show where having 20,000 followers directly correlates with an increase in business? Is it just the perception that is you have that many followers you are "better than" in something? If people contract with others based on the number of twitter, facebook, myspace etc followers rather than well reasoned research and proof of business practices, than they get what they deserve. Good or bad. Just my two cents. I never follow anyone because they have a million followers.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

igorthetroll — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:52:22 -0000

I wonder if Twitter is behind this. Is Twitter creating fake accounts just to get the buz out that it is growing? Time to raise new VC money?

Twitter does like to hype their service!

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Noah David Simon — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:19:24 -0000

the "Guardian" is probably the most disreputable newspaper that I can think of. nasty parasite of a news source. it would not surprise me if it was "Guardian"tech itself. I don't trust most media, but this one is nasty.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Kelly — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:28:34 -0000

I parsed a bit myself. I picked one of the users getting the fake follows. I looked at the most recent follower at the time who obviously fit the trend. They are quite easy to pick out, and they are being created fast and furious. I found that 57 users were being followed in random groups of 20. I compiled the data for 18 fake users, for a total of 360 follows. Here are the followed users alphabetically:

afinefrenzy
agent_m
algore
anamariecox
aplusk
bbcclick
biz
bjmendelson
britney spears
brookeburke
cnnbrk
coldplay
davejmatthews
davemorin
davidgregory
davos
defamer
delloutlet
dooce
downingstreet
ev
feliciaday
fragdolls
goldman
gstephanopoulos
guardiantech
ichcheezburger
ijustine
jack
jdickerson
jetblue
jimmyfallon
jodrellbank
kevinpollak
kevinrose
lancearmstrong
mashable
mchammer
nprpolitics
nytimes
pennjillette
sacca
sarabareilles
senjohnmccain
sockington
someecards
stevenbjohnson
techcrunch
the_real_shaq
themoment
tonyrobbins
twitter
veronica
wholefoods
wilw
woot
zappos

The most frequent follow came up 11 times (other than the user I was using as my basis, who came up all 18 times based on my method). The least frequent, 2 times. I only had one at each of those levels. I really don't feel that my sample size was large enough to share those results since people tend to infer too much. I will say that guardiantech only came up 3 times for me though.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Cory — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:35:21 -0000

Don't you see this "Suggested Users List" as artificially inflating a select fews' follower numbers?

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Barbara Kent — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:21:20 -0000

Hi Jacobren,

I'm in the same boat - when I opened my account it said I was following 29 people. List included CNN, BBC, John McCain. A couple of hours after that I had two people follow me. I wasn't a presence yet so I wondered if there was an auto program that identifies new accounts. Anyway, I'll follow you if you follow me. LOL My biggest challenge is this 140 limitation -- see the Twitter limerick I wrote on my page. Barbara Kent

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Aziz Poonawalla — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:12:27 -0000

how are the suggested sites chosen? is it algorithmic somehow or just a handpicked group?

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

mingyeow — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:53:40 -0000

Hi Brooks! Pretty interesting - we run MrTweet, and we have certainly noticed the massive increase by about 20 or so folks in an extremely short period of time. Fortunately or unfortunately for us, we have not received any "benefit" to this - we are growing at a very steady pace.

One thing to note is that Twitter's numbers are extremely inconsistent - for example, notice that our numbers did not change at all for the last 3 days, which is obviously not possible

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

@JoeHobot — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:13:55 -0000

Can't say much about this but I found the way this happened. Its really easy ;) but soon enough all of the "Name Taged" twitter accounts will be suspended and deleted eventually so everything should come to normal in next few weeks.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Paul M — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:08:08 -0000

I think it is more likely this is an instance of spamming vs. inflating follower numbers. I have recently had an up-tick in spam followers, who follow me and have marketing related posts in their updates.

My guess is the spammer bots use the various key users (techcrunch, the guardian) as anchor followers - either to harvest their followers to easily find a large community to spam, or to provide credibility with the twitter community managers / community gate keeping tools.

When the spammers started about 3-4 weeks ago, I would actually check their posts and click through to their sites, so they accomplished their goal. Now, I think this is less of an issue for the community (we all are going to follow who we will follow) as it is for twitter. Twitter will start seeing some scalability issues if these spam users are not nipped in the bud - if thousands of new users come online in a few days and get updates from the most frequent updating users, then there is a lot of database replication happening. But at least they will get stress tested before hitting mainstream.

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Bill H — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:14:18 -0000

Thanks for including that information. The big problem so far is that the number of people who don't think about the potential downsides of TweeterGetter massively outweighs the number that see the danger. A couple of people have already said that McCaffrey has effectively won - at least this round - and doesn't really care if his account now gets pulled.

Myself, I wonder if Twitter let the scheme run its course so they could see what happened - perhaps @Ev can fill us in here, if he's still monitoring this thread.

BTW, @SaltyDroid has pulled up some more good background stuff on these guys. It's all available on his blog (NSFW: language.)

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

brooksbayne — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:02:26 -0000

yeah, I emailed @MikeFitzAU and he responded with some great information about tweetergetter.

Here's what he wrote, in part:

"I don’t have a whole lot of research data behind me but a brief history:

· TweeterGetter was launched about Feb 11.

· I was alerted to its presence on Feb 14.

· My investigation of its promoter, Gary McCaffrey, rang alarm bells.

· People were handing over their Twitter usernames and passwords to a known spammer.

· I asked Gary what he was doing with all the usernames and passwords.

· He replied saying he was only collecting usernames.

· Of course, he’s collecting ALL the usernames, not just those who Follow him. He’s not that interested in followers, except to prove the effectiveness of his scheme.

· Some people are running a mile from TweeterGetter, but many are signing-up.

· Those who sign up have pre-selected themselves as gullible. This list is a multi-level-marketer’s dream.

· Blog posts in favour of TweeterGetter were appearing.

· I left a few warning comments about password safety.

· I created my own blog post. http://mike.brisgeek.com/20...

· Some folks thanked me for the heads up.

· Other staunch TweeterGetter supporters attacked me vehemently. (eg @jacebarnett was remarkably ugly)

· Notably, @brucewagner suggested that what I was doing was slander.

· My investigation of Mr Wagner’s habits revealed the army of ReTweet-bots. http://mike.brisgeek.com/20...

· He had 17 fake accounts which were fairly well crafted in that they had consistent photos, (generic) bios, links to (generally an organisation’s) website, even in some cases, colour schemes. Good enough to amass some followers of their own.

· The fake accounts did only two things: they reproduced items from a news feed (TechMeme, SkyNews, nytimes, msnbc, guardiantech etc) at a regular frequency and they RT’d @brucewagner every 2 hours.

· After collecting evidence and giving Mr Wagner enough rope to hang himself via a comment on my blog, his account was suspended on the 14th (15th here in Oz)

· Today, his account was reinstated, but he knows we are watching."

"Now putting 2 and 2 together with your observations, Mr Wagner’s technique may be more widespread. A massive increase in followers of news feeds starting Feb 11, could mean that Gary McCaffrey is also building his army of fake accounts ready to re-tweet his MLM spam."

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

chanux — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:15:53 -0000

So sad

Re: The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers

Joe Stanley — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:50:07 -0000

I found this article linked in a tweet from @ev last evening, and decided to follow you. I hadn't really noticed a spike in my followers up to that point. Within 12 hours of following you, I've gained at least 20 followers. What is even more strange is the fact that many of my new followers have commented on this post. None of the accounts look bogus, but I just found it odd. Is there a program that autofollows the people that have recently followed another person? Wow that was a mouthful.

@joe_stanley