From Elaine's Idle Mind,
Jan 30:
The New York Times had an interesting feature
over the weekend in which it calls out various social media influencers
for follower fraud. Many people who appear to have huge Twitter
followings actually don’t, and their fans are in fact paid-for bots. Oooh, busted!
Apparently there’s a class of people who make a career out of being
popular on Twitter, and it is terribly scandalous that they are not as
cool as they might seem.
NYTimes identifies a person’s fake followers by examining the account
creation date of each follower, and plotting the order in which they
followed the target user:
For example, this is Twitter board member Martha Lane Fox.
She gained tens of thousands of followers in 2016 and 2017, and it’s
super obvious which ones are fake. A bulk bot purchase shows up as a
large influx of followers, all with similar account creation dates
(horizontal lines in the above plot).
The NYTimes analysis is compelling, but their target account
selection was awfully limited. So I reproduced their Twitter tool to
continue the investigation.
First, I ran the tool on my own Twitter account and charted my followers:
See that clump on the left? My first thousand followers were all
bots. I know this, because I made them myself. For the first several
years of my Twitter existence, the only people I interacted with were
bots. Didn’t realize the platform could be useful for humans until 2016.
My account isn’t too interesting, because I don’t have many
followers. The NYTimes neglected to conduct the fake-follower analysis
on any of their own staffers, so in the interest of journalistic
objectivity, let’s look at NYTimes columnist @paulkrugman.
Paul Krugman has over 4 million Twitter followers. It would have
taken forever to download the entire list, so here’s a plot of the most
recent ones:
Over the last 3 days, @paulkrugman
gained over 20,000 followers, and nearly all the accounts were created
just minutes before the follow. That’s the solid horizontal line you see
across the top.
Who are these mysterious users who join Twitter and immediately follow @paulkrugman? Let’s have a look:
I’m gonna guess that approximately zero of these accounts belong to
real people. This is not to imply that Paul Krugman paid for his
followers – many bots automatically follow popular accounts upon
creation....MORE
