11–20 of 267 posts
1. Get burner email and phone number
2. Post bot to DO, AWS or run it on a raspi
3. ???
4. Profit from all those sweet followers.
Many of them look entirely "real" or they can be hilariously obvious. I would bet it is happening on Facebook, Instagram, Snap and any other social network where "value" is derived from followers/eyeballs.
This seems like a pretty straightforward thing to identify. I remember when the NYT's story, "The Agency", was published [0], some of the fake accounts it had mentioned were still up. Even though the accounts in that story were actually populated by real people, the sockpuppetry was pretty easy to identify. One: the accounts' past tweets right up until they started spreading the news about the fake U.S. disaster were…
> A Twitter spokesman said the social network had clear policy on automation that was "strictly enforced". > Users were barred from writing programs that automatically followed or unfollowed accounts or which "favourited" tweets in bulk, he said. I am constantly getting followed by accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of follows and followers, usually checkmarked accounts though I've never heard of them. It's…
UCL has dropped the ball on marketing itself. If this had been a student at MIT or Harvard, the article headline would have started with "MIT/Harvard Researcher ..." instead of burying the school's name in tiny print in the middle of the article.
The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted.
It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need to clean up their acts.