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Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers

arxiv.org

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Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers

#11

To 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.

I agree that the easiest detection system is to look at engagement of tweets...I have a few thousand followers and I average about 2 to 5 favorites/retweets...so if I see someone with 50,000 followers and less than that average, I get a little suspicious. But most people don't think to look at this...and news outlets are quick to jump on what seems like a valid tweet from a valid account. The reason why we don't see much of this happening is because most of the people who buy followers probably aren't hoping to do anything particularly malicious or disruptive.

Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers

#12
post #2

Why 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.

I'm curious if you use ad blocking? Why or why not?

Re: Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers

#13
Introduce the concept of verified and unverified number of followers. If you're willing to lose "verified number of followers" status, allow someone to pay and fill out any number they want in the followers field. If they want a verification of the number of followers (so that marketing companies feel comfortable paying celebs to sell products) have them pay a fee. Its a win both ways.
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