Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#2Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1)
Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive.
I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of undisclosed endorsements via podcasts / you tubers / etc
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#3Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1) Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive. I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of…
I don't find a high follower count suggestive of anything. I think that your threshold for regulatory intervention needs to be much higher. Vanity metrics are not a threat to the marketplace.
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#4Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1) Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive. I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of…
I don't find a high follower count suggestive of anything. I think that your threshold for regulatory intervention needs to be much higher. Vanity metrics are not a threat to the marketplace.
Sure, maybe consciously you aren't affected, but undoubtedly you see a difference between 0 followers and 10k followers (even if I bought all of them).
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#5Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1) Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive. I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of…
I don't find a high follower count suggestive of anything. I think that your threshold for regulatory intervention needs to be much higher. Vanity metrics are not a threat to the marketplace.
Absolutely. Once the govt takes an interest in keeping follower counts "accurate" it's going to meddle with all sorts of other metrics in your app too.
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#6I would really like to be to run this sort of analysis (or use tools/services that perform it for me), regardless of how efficient the current popular methods are. Is anyone familiar with the tools or services available to do so? Thanks in advance!
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#7Why fake followers? Social proof of course, one of the core tenants of getting a potential customer to trust you.(1) Faking followers to create the impression of social proof / trustworthiness should, of course, be regulated since it's flat out trickery and falsely persuasive. I don't envy the FTC's job on regulating commerce with issues like fake followers and the chaos ahead in regulating fake reviews, thousands of…
Twitter causes the problem by limiting the number of people you can follow. For example, people who want to grow their user base follow a lot of people so they can getting follows back. You might follow 500 people so you can get 50 of them to follow you. But once you follow 2,000 people you reach Twitter's limit and from there the number you can follow depends on how many people follow you. This is an incentive to buy fake followers, so you can continue to follow the people you actually want.
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#8I would really like to be to run this sort of analysis (or use tools/services that perform it for me), regardless of how efficient the current popular methods are. Is anyone familiar with the tools or services available to do so? Thanks in advance!
You can try twitteraudit.com (I made it a few years ago). It doesn't do anything fancy at all, but it works pretty well with about a 10% margin of error. It only looks at a sample of 5000 followers though.
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#9To call it 'dangerous' is a bit of a stretch..maybe annoying. The easiest detection system is that the tweets of an account with a lot of fake followers will have very little, if any, interaction . I'm kinda irked stuff like this makes to arxiv but you still need the 'two referrals' system to upload stuff. I can't image the worst math paper is much worse than this.
Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
#10I have no desire to buy "fame", but I do wish Twitter wouldn't correlate the number of people I'm allowed to follow to the number of people that follow me. I frequently hit their cap, and am forced to scan my following list for accounts that have stopped tweeting. This seems like a poor way of handling that scenario - you penalize the person that is still using the service that actively follows the constantly evolving network of users.