30 ms·

The Follower Factory

432 points by gregkerzhner 9y ago

pulisse 9y ago
From the article: Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.
ink404 9y ago
Love Adam Ferris's work -- he did the collages at the start of this piece, highly recommend checking out his website [1] [1]:https://adamferriss.com/ https://adamferriss.com/
- gt_ 9y ago
  Is that you, Adam Ferris?
  - justinwp 9y ago
    just a bot
    - TomK32 9y ago
      beep
      - ink404 9y ago
        bloop
        DonHopkins 9y ago
        You should have signed up for Old Glory Robot Insurance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno
- willbw 9y ago
  Wow, thanks for the link. His stuff is very cool.
RhodesianHunter 9y ago
It's a little strange to me that this is news honestly. You've been able to go on fiver and get fake followers for almost a decade now.
- roymurdock 9y ago
  I think they were expecting something more sinister or nefarious to pop up from the investigation, but it didn’t. So they ran a long piece without much of a point, but with some cool animations and random celebs sprinkled in for the outrage factor.
- CM30 9y ago
  Yup. Almost every bit of 'trickery' people and companies use to promote themself or their works has been a thing since the days of internet forums and mailing lists. Whether that be sockpuppet accounts, fake reviews, fudging the stats counters or anything else. The only reason it's seen as some 'new' thing is because many journalists seemingly didn't use the internet that much prior to the days of social media, and like many people online seem to think a lot of patterns are newer than they really are.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Or they’ve been using it for awhile and thought of the problem as the guys posting blatant herbal viagra & work from home scams, not realizing that the spammers weren’t just the bottom feeders any more.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Everyone knows that, but that doesn't tell you anything about the distribution and quality of people's online followings.
zajd 9y ago
Will Twitter ever handle this? Given how easily this journalist found this pattern I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to start banning these accounts with their internal metrics.
- jdanp 9y ago
  Why would they want to do that? If they allow this to occur they can post better growth numbers to their shareholders.
  - phillipcarter 9y ago
    Bingo. They have the capabilities to clean up their platform. But that would mean huge drops in “engagement” metrics.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    Basic capitalistic economic theory says that you must seek to maximize profits long term. If you allow fake accounts to flourish, you tarnish your brand and hurt your platform in the long term. Of course, theory is one thing but the people in charge of making decisions might have no motivation to prioritize the long term viability of the company if they themselves don't really care about the company and the shareholders but just want to extract maximum amounts of value for themselves...
    - lbotos 9y ago
      I can't speak to the past, but going forward, information businesses don't need to last forever, they can be useful in "waves". See Myspace/Groupon. Both have fallen out of "favor" but the brands still have value to "late adopters" or maybe even better "those lost to tech". I think we'll see more info businesses do this wave approach that is not about building the next GE, but really about short term exponential capital growth.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      Yes, basic capitalistic economic theory is wrong. Many companies will do whatever it takes to maximize short term profits, as long as they can reasonably get away with that (i.e., not go to jail).
angarg12 9y ago
The guy behind the top 1 restaurant in London on TripAdvisor said that he used to write fake reviews. Right now its not too difficult to identify patterns that tell real accounts or comments from fake ones, but as AI learns to write better and create more believable images and videos, I wonder how long it will take to create a bot account indistinguishable from a real one. Maybe this should be the Turing Test of our time.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >I wonder how long it will take to create a bot account indistinguishable from a real one. They are already pervasive. That’s why I stopped using Twitter. It is literally impossible to tell if you are reacting to an actual human’s tweet, or just being manipulated by bots.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- akvadrako 9y ago
  It depends what you are looking for. A bot today might even have a real insight, just by the luck of mixing two random points together. Just look at the top picks of r/subredditsimulator. But it won't be able to hold a longer conversation - that seems like a far ways off.
  - rkuykendall-com 9y ago
    > A bot today might even have a real insight, just by the luck of mixing two random points together When playing Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, and everyone puts their best attempts in a pile, add a random card from the deck. In many of the games I've played the deck wins by a long-shot.
Individualist 9y ago
To this day maintain that social media is a failed experiment and should be left behind in the dust for objective measurements.
- askafriend 9y ago
  Social networking IS the Internet in many ways. It’s been a natural extension of the Internet since the early days of forums and things like IRC. To say social networking is a failed experiment is to say that the Internet is a failed experiment - nonsense. Now I think what you mean to say is that you don’t like the UX of algorithmic feeds and firehose-style content/advertising. That’s fair. But to write off social networking as a concept? That’s silly. The internet is so powerful because it is social.
  - akjetma 9y ago
    The internet is inherently social, we don't need to reify that aspect in explicit sites for 'social networking'. It's a weird cargo-culty skeumorphism of a natural thing. I think we need maybe point-to-point and broadcast comm standards but not social networking sites that try to trap you and own you
- sincerely 9y ago
  I agree in the sense that any social media website which aims to create social interactions on a larger scale than the vast majority of humans are used to is a breeding ground for behavior like anonymous harassment etc. IMO the forum-type model is the best type of social media that i've seen from a community and usability perspective
Invictus0 9y ago
I don't care about people paying for extra followers. If that makes you feel special, be my guest. What I very much do care about is these bots that are being used by foreign nations and other bad actors to influence our national conversations and even our cultural zeitgeist. To propose a variant on Newton's third, for each powerful positive innovation, there is an equally powerful negative consequence. I wonder what can be done to stop this.
- coliveira 9y ago
  The US has being doing this for ages. The difference is that they used to pay mainstream media people in foreign countries to spread their vision of the world, and therefore poison the well of international news and commentary. Now the US is tasting a little bit of that in the form of social media, which is more polarized and difficult to control.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    That doesn't make it OK for the individual people who live with it. This idea that it's somehow just payback for past bad actions by a government that most of them weren't aware of is no help to regular folk who are drowning in a sea of misinformation.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      This is not a justification, it is just an explanation of what is happening. It is a well-known state of affairs throughout the world, where foreign powers constantly jockey to spread political disinformation. Only now this is also becoming reality inside the US because of changes in patterns of media consumption spearheaded by companies such as FB and Google.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Sorry for misreading your tone. You make a good point and I agree with your objective assessment.
cfitz 9y ago
Irrelevant to the content of the article, but I am such a fan of the direction the NYT has taken with their interactive articles. Breaking up long-winded articles via relevant images is no longer sufficient to maintain most readers' attention. The NYT may just reach their 10 million subscriber goal [1] via these very enjoyable (often scroll-triggered) animations and charts/graphics and I hope they continue with these efforts. [1] https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interactive-news-desk-subscription-drive/ https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interacti...
- pgwhalen 9y ago
  Completely agreed. This was an enjoyable experience for me, even on a phone. And it didn’t seem to come at the cost of journalistic quality.
  - tragic 9y ago
    Hmmm... It seemed to lose track of the scroll position completely by the end for me (Firefox on android). Possibly ad blocker related. Interesting piece, though.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  The "Families of bots" chart was so incredibly cool it floored me.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  I like it, but it's also a bit confusing. I use a read it later service (Instapaper) to read articles from everywhere and interactive ones like this tend to break it. That in itself is okay, it's just that you don't realize it's broken unless you open the full article and look for interactive bits.
  - arnarbi 9y ago
    > interactive [articles] like this tend to break [Instapaper]. I would argue it is squarely the other way around.
gt_ 9y ago
The pseudocode in the article is a curious touch. I wonder where they're going with this. You've gotta love the convenient 'when' statement.
- desertrider12 9y ago
  I was wondering about that. It magically sets up an event handler and callback with the next statement? Yes please.
jtbayly 9y ago
What I'd like to know is what is the difference between paying an influencer to tweet about your product with their account vs paying Devumi to tweet about your product with their accounts? Is the first any more legitimate?
- jvagner 9y ago
  At the least, disclosure.
randomdrake 9y ago
The New York Times can graph and identify bots, and other publications / bloggers have been able to identify networks of them. Supposedly, the best and brightest get recruited by companies like Twitter and Facebook, but for some reason they're incapable of identifying and shutting these things down? What is all the hubbub about machine learning, and things like neural networks, if they aren't being actively employed by the tech giants? There's only a couple possible scenarios I can come up with for why this continues to occur: 1) The best and the brightest actually don't work for any of these companies; they're just constantly trying to catch up to teams of developers more highly skilled than them. They are bright, and decent, but ultimately mostly average. 2) The developers in these companies are on par with those who can graph and identify these networks of malicious and fake content makers, but they just don't care because # == $. 3) The companies actually have their head so far in the sand that they don't have the technology, or the resources, to combat this. I find it hard to believe that people outside of the ecosystem of these companies have more skill, knowledge, or capabilities (1). It also pains me to think that hundreds of millions or billions of dollars simply cannot run a company that can combat this (3). So that seems to leave complacency (2), which is disturbing and definitely should send up more red flags about whether we should be giving these networks any attention at all. I'd love to hear other possibilities or maybe more information to back up any of the other scenarios.
- jayess 9y ago
  It seems to me the simplest answer is that they're fully aware and not doing anything about it. It doesn't take the best and brightest to figure it out. I've purchased thousands of twitter and facebook followers before for $5 on fiverr just for fun. There's no reason twitter or facebook can't do the same and identify the fake accounts. The logical conclusion is that they don't want to.
  - pdx 9y ago
    I agree. Just buy them. If they spend $100K a year on buying fake accounts and then banning those accounts, that will be more effective than messing about paying a team of 10 engineers to do pattern analysis. If they spent $2M a year on buying and then banning fake accounts, they would squash it completely. They're not doing it because they like the big follower counts themselves. They're in on the con.
yvsong 9y ago
Is there an executive summary of the article?
- catacombs 9y ago
  Just read it.
- TomK32 9y ago
  Or use a bot for a lousy summary http://smmry.com/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html#&SM_LENGTH=7 http://smmry.com/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01...
- tedmiston 9y ago
  Upvoting you because this was a long read. My summary - There are a lot of twitter users with fake followers. This company, Devumi, behind selling fake followers claims they're not really fake because they buy the followers on an influencer marketplace so they're "real" to the buyer (obviously seems questionable). Some people have their social identities stolen which are in turn used to create these fake profiles. Lots of celebrities, athletes, and other famous people have bought fake followers — some directly, others through marketing agencies, and others possibly completely without their knowledge. Most people that the NYT called out denied having knowledge of the purchase of fake followers or blamed a rogue employee. The bots interact in rings with each other so their activity patterns are detectable with analysis. Twitter is not necessarily incentivized to solve the problem because there are probably some bots it has not detected and considers real active users. The founder of the company lists a fake address as residence and fake university degrees as credentials. It is a long read, but the article has several interactive features that keep it interesting.
- notatoad 9y ago
  there's bots on twitter.
BadassFractal 9y ago
It's been amusing to see fake follower buying explode on Instagram this last few years in the photography / modeling space. Photographers buy 50-100k fake followers, which you can easily see because each one of their posts barely gets 200 likes, but people who don't check or don't know how the game is played think you're a big deal. With your 100k followers you can now reach out to models, who also bought a ton of followers themselves, and you can work together because now you're at a similar level of perceived clout, neither one of you is stepping down to collaborate with a "nobody". When you work together, you think you will get exposure to each other's fan base, but in reality 95% of your followers are artificial, nobody wins in the end. Maybe you get some insta-fame from regular people casually using IG who have no idea how this stuff works. You'll notice that brands rarely ever sponsor the type of people above because every time they let them run a promotion nobody ends up buying their products as a result of the shoutout. And that's because these people purchased their digital fame, and fake followers don't have credit cards to buy flat tummy tea or hair gummies or whatever they're peddling that day. It's reminiscent of steroids, you probably wish you didn't have to take them, but if you're going to be playing that specific game, you have to take them or you'll be left out by those who do cheat. Growing your instagram following organically these days is crazy hard. Both I and people I know with all sorts of numbers are mostly seeing constant loss of followers (fake accounts being taken down?) despite constant posting schedules of quality content. Discoverability through hashtags is dead as far as I can tell. It's reminiscent of trying to get big an an iOS app developer through the App Store alone, it's just not going to happen anymore, it's not 2007. People (specifically photographers) are looking for an alternative to IG, but there's not one in sight. Ello is OK, but it's an artist circlejerk. 500px is a botfest. Steemit seems interesting but it's also being overrun by garbage content.
- nradov 9y ago
  Why don't the fake followers automatically like those posts?
  - BadassFractal 9y ago
    It's actually a service that these companies offer, but it's significantly more expensive over time since it's a continuous activity vs. a one time thing. I imagine it's a lot more maintenance on their end. It's one thing to have x fake accounts follow you once, but it's another thing altogether to script the same x accounts to like every one of your posts every time. It's actually a downward spiral for people playing this game: you buy 100k followers, not cheap, but you can take that hit once. However if you want to look legit, you have to constantly pay for those accounts to like your posts, which over months can add up to a really unpleasant bill. It's especially unpleasant because none of those followers are monetizable, since they're not real, and you're now on the hook to keep paying for likes in perpetuity, or people might call you out. It's a reason why often you will see the nouveau-famous influencers claim that "IG shut down my account because my content was too saucy" as a way to save face and stop paying for likes. In reality they closed the account themselves and started from scratch because they could no longer afford the bill. Again, most have no idea, watching this from the outside.
wstrange 9y ago
What I don't get is how appropriating someone's persona and account details (photo, etc) is not fraudulent? I suppose it is hard to prove - since they purchased these profiles from foreign entity. But surely Devumi knew many of these profiles were stolen from real people without their consent.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
The social media platforms are not 'struggling to respond.' They have ignored the issue almost completely because it inflates their metrics and enables them to over-bill advertisers. This in turn corrodes the trust that people have in the web in general. The prevalence of bots really puts stress on the whole idea that pageviews on free websites are the same thing as subscribers to paid services. It is very simple to mass manufacture fake views and fake users on free services. It is not so simple to massively fabricate metrics around paying users.
- themagician 9y ago
  They do combat it—but only just enough to keep the system in balance. IMO they should completely ignore it. If they let the bots run completely wild then like/follower/retweet/comment counts will all become completely useless and probably disappear completely. The internet was a better place before every piece of content had a number associated with it. A number that serves no real purpose other than to manipulate you into thinking it is more or less legitimate/important than you would otherwise know at first glance.
Hasknewbie 9y ago
It's pretty good that this kind of open secret gets coverage in the mainstream media, but it's disappointing that this article contents itself with a bit of celebrity shaming and only hammering on Twitter, probably because they're a bit more transparent (technically speaking) and easier to take down. Other networks (i.e. Facebook/Instagram) are probably just as bad, and if so they are generating untold amount of ad revenue based on fake traffic and accounts.
- Spearchucker 9y ago
  Not sure the coverage will do any good anyway. First thing I did after reading the Times piece was to see just how easy it is. Not only is it easy, it's CHEAP! I paid GB £8 for 500 Instagram followers. Within 10 mintes I had just shy of 1,000 new followers. So they under promise and over deliver, all the while playing to people's ego. That buying followers is a thing does not surpise me. I wonder how many others bought followers in response to this article.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
DonHopkins 9y ago
Looks like this story has already triggered an investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman! "New York attorney general launches investigation into bot factory after Times exposé. Louise Linton, Randy Bryce, and Clay Aiken all bought fake Twitter followers from a company called Devumi." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/27/16940426/eric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-twitter-times https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/27/16940426/e... Eric Schneiderman @AGSchneiderman Retweeted The New York Times Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law. We’re opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen identities. https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2018%2F1%2F27%2F16940426%2Feric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-twitter-times https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312...
matte_black 9y ago
When any new social network arises, is it worth building up a network of fake accounts on it?
mattgreenrocks 9y ago
What if we all agreed that Internet points just don’t mean that much? It is ridiculous that in my lifetime the general public flipped from “Internet is for dweebs” to thinking numbers on a website are actually worth caring about.
- gist 9y ago
  > if we all agreed that Internet Who is the 'we' in that exactly? This is like saying 'what if we all agreed that a fancy car or trappings of wealth don't mean anything' or 'what if we all agreed that an Ivy Degree doesn't mean anything'? [1] [1] I am offering some marketing help gratis for a wealth advisor today (side project). I am going to tell her to buy a fancy car because it will work better than the soccer mom vehicle she now drives in landing and impressing clients that she is trying to tap. I don't need any research to prove that out either. I know people respond to cues like this (I own said cars) so I know it's a fair bet that 'we' is never going to get together and not care about that type of thing. So it's an investment in marketing and advertising not a cost of transportation. Now maybe you or hn readers don't think the same way and it would sway you and you don't care. Doesn't matter. Enough people care to make it a viable strategy. If I see a large amount of twitter followers I might browse the first page or so and quickly determine how 'legit' they are. But most people don't do that. They focus on the number only, right?
physicbits 9y ago
It's sad that such dubious companies exists, but the saddest part is that celebs are paying literally tons of money to keep themself 'uberfamous' while these companies are counting the cash they just earned from them. Even with newly created twitter accounts you get followers in like a day, whereby some of them are fake accounts, mostly using erotic profile pictures of some kind... P.s. I like the NYT interactive articles, very nicely done with lots of details.
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  Everybody is in on it except for the casual folk, who I imagine make up the vast majority of the user base and have no clue what's going on behind the scenes.
TomK32 9y ago
Hey, reading the article made me realize there's space for a tool to clean out all those bots from your follower list. People like @chefsymon who are now a bit embarrassed by their previous acquisitions.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  I just searched for tools like this out of curiosity. There are a few but they all seem pretty sketchy, like only allowing one run or requesting dubious twitter permissions to run an analysis that shouldn't require auth-ing at all.
- unreal37 9y ago
  Manageflitter is pretty good. It identifies likely fake followers and lets you block them. https://manageflitter.com/ https://manageflitter.com/
flatline 9y ago
These companies have sold investors on the value of their social graph. Nobody was quite sure what, exactly, that value is, but it I think it is clear that it has one. Early on, celebrities organically grew followings. This gave them a direct, bidirectional channel to their followers - there’s a value of the service, more than the graph. Later arrivals to the platform had a problem, and so did the service provider: how do you promote yourself to a broad subset of the network, quickly? Recommendation systems have been around for a long time, so that’s part of the solution. But if you wanted a quick spin up, word of mouth and algorithmic solutions weren’t going to go that far. And what if you had an unpopular brand and we’re looking to improve it? Those things almost worked against you. Deliberate promotion is another outlet, but people are looking for viral magnification of their message. This is, I would argue, a real value to the network. Spontaneous memetic propagation. This is possibly the only real value of the network at scale. But you can’t sell it, at least not directly. The appearance of deliberate, centralized control does not yield the desired result. People can distinguish emergent network behavior from facile promotion very easily, subconsciously even. The value of the network is in social ties. So people whose friends genuinely like something - they are more likely to like that thing, too. If the service provider is going to leverage the power of the network for themselves, they need these bot networks. They need to sell indirect access to the network, because direct access is not the desired product. And the network effect is very powerful, as we increasingly see isolated subgroups creating virtual echochambers, and others paying to exploit and shape those shape those sub graphs. These networks are powerful and potentially dangerous artifacts. I think we should have asked in 2009, could something like the Arab spring happen in a developed, stable nation? But nobody was asking that, I certainly wasn’t. It is a interesting time to be alive.
hwestiii 9y ago
I was personally amused at the number of purchasers of these fake followers "did not respond to request for comment"
dredmorbius 9y ago
Turns out Devumi's been shilling services on G+: https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.google.com/+Devumi/posts/BjW662pbwcd https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.goog... https://plus.google.com/+Devumi https://plus.google.com/+Devumi
epx 9y ago
I have found that my YouTube account, that has no intention of being famous and had a couple followers, is now getting a constant trickle of new subscribers every day, with funny names that look autogenerated. It may have some relation with changes in YouTube monetization that will demand a minimum number of subscribers. I hope my account will not be jeopardized by this.
hackandtrip 9y ago
Devumi is a reseller. Services they use are near 0.1/1000 follower, even less, with pool of 200k+ users per Services, 3/4 pools (just use Google, for Facebook many are even real, collect tokens is fairly easy). And people that sell these services at those prices, are reseller themselves using API to control those bots, in really EVERY services you think about (even telegram); revenue made by likes/etc may be really a small part, just think about the power in elections + the the really small price

432 points by gregkerzhner 9y ago

From the article: Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

ink404 9y ago

Love Adam Ferris's work -- he did the collages at the start of this piece, highly recommend checking out his website [1] [1]:https://adamferriss.com/ https://adamferriss.com/

gt_ 9y ago
Is that you, Adam Ferris?
- justinwp 9y ago
  just a bot
  - TomK32 9y ago
    beep
    - ink404 9y ago
      bloop
      - DonHopkins 9y ago
        You should have signed up for Old Glory Robot Insurance! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno
willbw 9y ago
Wow, thanks for the link. His stuff is very cool.

RhodesianHunter 9y ago

It's a little strange to me that this is news honestly. You've been able to go on fiver and get fake followers for almost a decade now.

roymurdock 9y ago
I think they were expecting something more sinister or nefarious to pop up from the investigation, but it didn’t. So they ran a long piece without much of a point, but with some cool animations and random celebs sprinkled in for the outrage factor.
CM30 9y ago
Yup. Almost every bit of 'trickery' people and companies use to promote themself or their works has been a thing since the days of internet forums and mailing lists. Whether that be sockpuppet accounts, fake reviews, fudging the stats counters or anything else. The only reason it's seen as some 'new' thing is because many journalists seemingly didn't use the internet that much prior to the days of social media, and like many people online seem to think a lot of patterns are newer than they really are.
- acdha 9y ago
  Or they’ve been using it for awhile and thought of the problem as the guys posting blatant herbal viagra & work from home scams, not realizing that the spammers weren’t just the bottom feeders any more.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 9y ago
Everyone knows that, but that doesn't tell you anything about the distribution and quality of people's online followings.

zajd 9y ago

Will Twitter ever handle this? Given how easily this journalist found this pattern I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to start banning these accounts with their internal metrics.

jdanp 9y ago
Why would they want to do that? If they allow this to occur they can post better growth numbers to their shareholders.
- phillipcarter 9y ago
  Bingo. They have the capabilities to clean up their platform. But that would mean huge drops in “engagement” metrics.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  Basic capitalistic economic theory says that you must seek to maximize profits long term. If you allow fake accounts to flourish, you tarnish your brand and hurt your platform in the long term. Of course, theory is one thing but the people in charge of making decisions might have no motivation to prioritize the long term viability of the company if they themselves don't really care about the company and the shareholders but just want to extract maximum amounts of value for themselves...
  - lbotos 9y ago
    I can't speak to the past, but going forward, information businesses don't need to last forever, they can be useful in "waves". See Myspace/Groupon. Both have fallen out of "favor" but the brands still have value to "late adopters" or maybe even better "those lost to tech". I think we'll see more info businesses do this wave approach that is not about building the next GE, but really about short term exponential capital growth.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    Yes, basic capitalistic economic theory is wrong. Many companies will do whatever it takes to maximize short term profits, as long as they can reasonably get away with that (i.e., not go to jail).

angarg12 9y ago

The guy behind the top 1 restaurant in London on TripAdvisor said that he used to write fake reviews. Right now its not too difficult to identify patterns that tell real accounts or comments from fake ones, but as AI learns to write better and create more believable images and videos, I wonder how long it will take to create a bot account indistinguishable from a real one. Maybe this should be the Turing Test of our time.

aphextron 9y ago
>I wonder how long it will take to create a bot account indistinguishable from a real one. They are already pervasive. That’s why I stopped using Twitter. It is literally impossible to tell if you are reacting to an actual human’s tweet, or just being manipulated by bots.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
akvadrako 9y ago
It depends what you are looking for. A bot today might even have a real insight, just by the luck of mixing two random points together. Just look at the top picks of r/subredditsimulator. But it won't be able to hold a longer conversation - that seems like a far ways off.
- rkuykendall-com 9y ago
  > A bot today might even have a real insight, just by the luck of mixing two random points together When playing Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, and everyone puts their best attempts in a pile, add a random card from the deck. In many of the games I've played the deck wins by a long-shot.

Individualist 9y ago

To this day maintain that social media is a failed experiment and should be left behind in the dust for objective measurements.

askafriend 9y ago
Social networking IS the Internet in many ways. It’s been a natural extension of the Internet since the early days of forums and things like IRC. To say social networking is a failed experiment is to say that the Internet is a failed experiment - nonsense. Now I think what you mean to say is that you don’t like the UX of algorithmic feeds and firehose-style content/advertising. That’s fair. But to write off social networking as a concept? That’s silly. The internet is so powerful because it is social.
- akjetma 9y ago
  The internet is inherently social, we don't need to reify that aspect in explicit sites for 'social networking'. It's a weird cargo-culty skeumorphism of a natural thing. I think we need maybe point-to-point and broadcast comm standards but not social networking sites that try to trap you and own you
sincerely 9y ago
I agree in the sense that any social media website which aims to create social interactions on a larger scale than the vast majority of humans are used to is a breeding ground for behavior like anonymous harassment etc. IMO the forum-type model is the best type of social media that i've seen from a community and usability perspective

Invictus0 9y ago

I don't care about people paying for extra followers. If that makes you feel special, be my guest. What I very much do care about is these bots that are being used by foreign nations and other bad actors to influence our national conversations and even our cultural zeitgeist. To propose a variant on Newton's third, for each powerful positive innovation, there is an equally powerful negative consequence. I wonder what can be done to stop this.

coliveira 9y ago
The US has being doing this for ages. The difference is that they used to pay mainstream media people in foreign countries to spread their vision of the world, and therefore poison the well of international news and commentary. Now the US is tasting a little bit of that in the form of social media, which is more polarized and difficult to control.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That doesn't make it OK for the individual people who live with it. This idea that it's somehow just payback for past bad actions by a government that most of them weren't aware of is no help to regular folk who are drowning in a sea of misinformation.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    This is not a justification, it is just an explanation of what is happening. It is a well-known state of affairs throughout the world, where foreign powers constantly jockey to spread political disinformation. Only now this is also becoming reality inside the US because of changes in patterns of media consumption spearheaded by companies such as FB and Google.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Sorry for misreading your tone. You make a good point and I agree with your objective assessment.

cfitz 9y ago

Irrelevant to the content of the article, but I am such a fan of the direction the NYT has taken with their interactive articles. Breaking up long-winded articles via relevant images is no longer sufficient to maintain most readers' attention. The NYT may just reach their 10 million subscriber goal [1] via these very enjoyable (often scroll-triggered) animations and charts/graphics and I hope they continue with these efforts. [1] https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interactive-news-desk-subscription-drive/ https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interacti...

pgwhalen 9y ago
Completely agreed. This was an enjoyable experience for me, even on a phone. And it didn’t seem to come at the cost of journalistic quality.
- tragic 9y ago
  Hmmm... It seemed to lose track of the scroll position completely by the end for me (Firefox on android). Possibly ad blocker related. Interesting piece, though.
scrollaway 9y ago
The "Families of bots" chart was so incredibly cool it floored me.
tedmiston 9y ago
I like it, but it's also a bit confusing. I use a read it later service (Instapaper) to read articles from everywhere and interactive ones like this tend to break it. That in itself is okay, it's just that you don't realize it's broken unless you open the full article and look for interactive bits.
- arnarbi 9y ago
  > interactive [articles] like this tend to break [Instapaper]. I would argue it is squarely the other way around.

gt_ 9y ago

The pseudocode in the article is a curious touch. I wonder where they're going with this. You've gotta love the convenient 'when' statement.

desertrider12 9y ago
I was wondering about that. It magically sets up an event handler and callback with the next statement? Yes please.

jtbayly 9y ago

What I'd like to know is what is the difference between paying an influencer to tweet about your product with their account vs paying Devumi to tweet about your product with their accounts? Is the first any more legitimate?

jvagner 9y ago
At the least, disclosure.

randomdrake 9y ago

The New York Times can graph and identify bots, and other publications / bloggers have been able to identify networks of them. Supposedly, the best and brightest get recruited by companies like Twitter and Facebook, but for some reason they're incapable of identifying and shutting these things down? What is all the hubbub about machine learning, and things like neural networks, if they aren't being actively employed by the tech giants? There's only a couple possible scenarios I can come up with for why this continues to occur: 1) The best and the brightest actually don't work for any of these companies; they're just constantly trying to catch up to teams of developers more highly skilled than them. They are bright, and decent, but ultimately mostly average. 2) The developers in these companies are on par with those who can graph and identify these networks of malicious and fake content makers, but they just don't care because # == $. 3) The companies actually have their head so far in the sand that they don't have the technology, or the resources, to combat this. I find it hard to believe that people outside of the ecosystem of these companies have more skill, knowledge, or capabilities (1). It also pains me to think that hundreds of millions or billions of dollars simply cannot run a company that can combat this (3). So that seems to leave complacency (2), which is disturbing and definitely should send up more red flags about whether we should be giving these networks any attention at all. I'd love to hear other possibilities or maybe more information to back up any of the other scenarios.

jayess 9y ago
It seems to me the simplest answer is that they're fully aware and not doing anything about it. It doesn't take the best and brightest to figure it out. I've purchased thousands of twitter and facebook followers before for $5 on fiverr just for fun. There's no reason twitter or facebook can't do the same and identify the fake accounts. The logical conclusion is that they don't want to.
- pdx 9y ago
  I agree. Just buy them. If they spend $100K a year on buying fake accounts and then banning those accounts, that will be more effective than messing about paying a team of 10 engineers to do pattern analysis. If they spent $2M a year on buying and then banning fake accounts, they would squash it completely. They're not doing it because they like the big follower counts themselves. They're in on the con.

yvsong 9y ago

Is there an executive summary of the article?

catacombs 9y ago
Just read it.
TomK32 9y ago
Or use a bot for a lousy summary http://smmry.com/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html#&SM_LENGTH=7 http://smmry.com/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01...
tedmiston 9y ago
Upvoting you because this was a long read. My summary - There are a lot of twitter users with fake followers. This company, Devumi, behind selling fake followers claims they're not really fake because they buy the followers on an influencer marketplace so they're "real" to the buyer (obviously seems questionable). Some people have their social identities stolen which are in turn used to create these fake profiles. Lots of celebrities, athletes, and other famous people have bought fake followers — some directly, others through marketing agencies, and others possibly completely without their knowledge. Most people that the NYT called out denied having knowledge of the purchase of fake followers or blamed a rogue employee. The bots interact in rings with each other so their activity patterns are detectable with analysis. Twitter is not necessarily incentivized to solve the problem because there are probably some bots it has not detected and considers real active users. The founder of the company lists a fake address as residence and fake university degrees as credentials. It is a long read, but the article has several interactive features that keep it interesting.
notatoad 9y ago
there's bots on twitter.

BadassFractal 9y ago

It's been amusing to see fake follower buying explode on Instagram this last few years in the photography / modeling space. Photographers buy 50-100k fake followers, which you can easily see because each one of their posts barely gets 200 likes, but people who don't check or don't know how the game is played think you're a big deal. With your 100k followers you can now reach out to models, who also bought a ton of followers themselves, and you can work together because now you're at a similar level of perceived clout, neither one of you is stepping down to collaborate with a "nobody". When you work together, you think you will get exposure to each other's fan base, but in reality 95% of your followers are artificial, nobody wins in the end. Maybe you get some insta-fame from regular people casually using IG who have no idea how this stuff works. You'll notice that brands rarely ever sponsor the type of people above because every time they let them run a promotion nobody ends up buying their products as a result of the shoutout. And that's because these people purchased their digital fame, and fake followers don't have credit cards to buy flat tummy tea or hair gummies or whatever they're peddling that day. It's reminiscent of steroids, you probably wish you didn't have to take them, but if you're going to be playing that specific game, you have to take them or you'll be left out by those who do cheat. Growing your instagram following organically these days is crazy hard. Both I and people I know with all sorts of numbers are mostly seeing constant loss of followers (fake accounts being taken down?) despite constant posting schedules of quality content. Discoverability through hashtags is dead as far as I can tell. It's reminiscent of trying to get big an an iOS app developer through the App Store alone, it's just not going to happen anymore, it's not 2007. People (specifically photographers) are looking for an alternative to IG, but there's not one in sight. Ello is OK, but it's an artist circlejerk. 500px is a botfest. Steemit seems interesting but it's also being overrun by garbage content.

nradov 9y ago
Why don't the fake followers automatically like those posts?
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  It's actually a service that these companies offer, but it's significantly more expensive over time since it's a continuous activity vs. a one time thing. I imagine it's a lot more maintenance on their end. It's one thing to have x fake accounts follow you once, but it's another thing altogether to script the same x accounts to like every one of your posts every time. It's actually a downward spiral for people playing this game: you buy 100k followers, not cheap, but you can take that hit once. However if you want to look legit, you have to constantly pay for those accounts to like your posts, which over months can add up to a really unpleasant bill. It's especially unpleasant because none of those followers are monetizable, since they're not real, and you're now on the hook to keep paying for likes in perpetuity, or people might call you out. It's a reason why often you will see the nouveau-famous influencers claim that "IG shut down my account because my content was too saucy" as a way to save face and stop paying for likes. In reality they closed the account themselves and started from scratch because they could no longer afford the bill. Again, most have no idea, watching this from the outside.

wstrange 9y ago

What I don't get is how appropriating someone's persona and account details (photo, etc) is not fraudulent? I suppose it is hard to prove - since they purchased these profiles from foreign entity. But surely Devumi knew many of these profiles were stolen from real people without their consent.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

The social media platforms are not 'struggling to respond.' They have ignored the issue almost completely because it inflates their metrics and enables them to over-bill advertisers. This in turn corrodes the trust that people have in the web in general. The prevalence of bots really puts stress on the whole idea that pageviews on free websites are the same thing as subscribers to paid services. It is very simple to mass manufacture fake views and fake users on free services. It is not so simple to massively fabricate metrics around paying users.

themagician 9y ago
They do combat it—but only just enough to keep the system in balance. IMO they should completely ignore it. If they let the bots run completely wild then like/follower/retweet/comment counts will all become completely useless and probably disappear completely. The internet was a better place before every piece of content had a number associated with it. A number that serves no real purpose other than to manipulate you into thinking it is more or less legitimate/important than you would otherwise know at first glance.

Hasknewbie 9y ago

It's pretty good that this kind of open secret gets coverage in the mainstream media, but it's disappointing that this article contents itself with a bit of celebrity shaming and only hammering on Twitter, probably because they're a bit more transparent (technically speaking) and easier to take down. Other networks (i.e. Facebook/Instagram) are probably just as bad, and if so they are generating untold amount of ad revenue based on fake traffic and accounts.

Spearchucker 9y ago
Not sure the coverage will do any good anyway. First thing I did after reading the Times piece was to see just how easy it is. Not only is it easy, it's CHEAP! I paid GB £8 for 500 Instagram followers. Within 10 mintes I had just shy of 1,000 new followers. So they under promise and over deliver, all the while playing to people's ego. That buying followers is a thing does not surpise me. I wonder how many others bought followers in response to this article.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

DonHopkins 9y ago

Looks like this story has already triggered an investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman! "New York attorney general launches investigation into bot factory after Times exposé. Louise Linton, Randy Bryce, and Clay Aiken all bought fake Twitter followers from a company called Devumi." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/27/16940426/eric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-twitter-times https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/27/16940426/e... Eric Schneiderman @AGSchneiderman Retweeted The New York Times Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law. We’re opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen identities. https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2018%2F1%2F27%2F16940426%2Feric-schneiderman-fake-accounts-twitter-times https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/957289783490957312...

matte_black 9y ago

When any new social network arises, is it worth building up a network of fake accounts on it?

mattgreenrocks 9y ago

What if we all agreed that Internet points just don’t mean that much? It is ridiculous that in my lifetime the general public flipped from “Internet is for dweebs” to thinking numbers on a website are actually worth caring about.

gist 9y ago
> if we all agreed that Internet Who is the 'we' in that exactly? This is like saying 'what if we all agreed that a fancy car or trappings of wealth don't mean anything' or 'what if we all agreed that an Ivy Degree doesn't mean anything'? [1] [1] I am offering some marketing help gratis for a wealth advisor today (side project). I am going to tell her to buy a fancy car because it will work better than the soccer mom vehicle she now drives in landing and impressing clients that she is trying to tap. I don't need any research to prove that out either. I know people respond to cues like this (I own said cars) so I know it's a fair bet that 'we' is never going to get together and not care about that type of thing. So it's an investment in marketing and advertising not a cost of transportation. Now maybe you or hn readers don't think the same way and it would sway you and you don't care. Doesn't matter. Enough people care to make it a viable strategy. If I see a large amount of twitter followers I might browse the first page or so and quickly determine how 'legit' they are. But most people don't do that. They focus on the number only, right?

physicbits 9y ago

It's sad that such dubious companies exists, but the saddest part is that celebs are paying literally tons of money to keep themself 'uberfamous' while these companies are counting the cash they just earned from them. Even with newly created twitter accounts you get followers in like a day, whereby some of them are fake accounts, mostly using erotic profile pictures of some kind... P.s. I like the NYT interactive articles, very nicely done with lots of details.

BadassFractal 9y ago
Everybody is in on it except for the casual folk, who I imagine make up the vast majority of the user base and have no clue what's going on behind the scenes.

TomK32 9y ago

Hey, reading the article made me realize there's space for a tool to clean out all those bots from your follower list. People like @chefsymon who are now a bit embarrassed by their previous acquisitions.

tedmiston 9y ago
I just searched for tools like this out of curiosity. There are a few but they all seem pretty sketchy, like only allowing one run or requesting dubious twitter permissions to run an analysis that shouldn't require auth-ing at all.
unreal37 9y ago
Manageflitter is pretty good. It identifies likely fake followers and lets you block them. https://manageflitter.com/ https://manageflitter.com/

flatline 9y ago

These companies have sold investors on the value of their social graph. Nobody was quite sure what, exactly, that value is, but it I think it is clear that it has one. Early on, celebrities organically grew followings. This gave them a direct, bidirectional channel to their followers - there’s a value of the service, more than the graph. Later arrivals to the platform had a problem, and so did the service provider: how do you promote yourself to a broad subset of the network, quickly? Recommendation systems have been around for a long time, so that’s part of the solution. But if you wanted a quick spin up, word of mouth and algorithmic solutions weren’t going to go that far. And what if you had an unpopular brand and we’re looking to improve it? Those things almost worked against you. Deliberate promotion is another outlet, but people are looking for viral magnification of their message. This is, I would argue, a real value to the network. Spontaneous memetic propagation. This is possibly the only real value of the network at scale. But you can’t sell it, at least not directly. The appearance of deliberate, centralized control does not yield the desired result. People can distinguish emergent network behavior from facile promotion very easily, subconsciously even. The value of the network is in social ties. So people whose friends genuinely like something - they are more likely to like that thing, too. If the service provider is going to leverage the power of the network for themselves, they need these bot networks. They need to sell indirect access to the network, because direct access is not the desired product. And the network effect is very powerful, as we increasingly see isolated subgroups creating virtual echochambers, and others paying to exploit and shape those shape those sub graphs. These networks are powerful and potentially dangerous artifacts. I think we should have asked in 2009, could something like the Arab spring happen in a developed, stable nation? But nobody was asking that, I certainly wasn’t. It is a interesting time to be alive.

hwestiii 9y ago

I was personally amused at the number of purchasers of these fake followers "did not respond to request for comment"

dredmorbius 9y ago

Turns out Devumi's been shilling services on G+: https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.google.com/+Devumi/posts/BjW662pbwcd https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.goog... https://plus.google.com/+Devumi https://plus.google.com/+Devumi

epx 9y ago

I have found that my YouTube account, that has no intention of being famous and had a couple followers, is now getting a constant trickle of new subscribers every day, with funny names that look autogenerated. It may have some relation with changes in YouTube monetization that will demand a minimum number of subscribers. I hope my account will not be jeopardized by this.

hackandtrip 9y ago

Devumi is a reseller. Services they use are near 0.1/1000 follower, even less, with pool of 200k+ users per Services, 3/4 pools (just use Google, for Facebook many are even real, collect tokens is fairly easy). And people that sell these services at those prices, are reseller themselves using API to control those bots, in really EVERY services you think about (even telegram); revenue made by likes/etc may be really a small part, just think about the power in elections + the the really small price