How fake are your Twitter followers?

Twitter used to be all about who had most following them but beware the plague of ‘bots’ — bogus accounts run by computers. Jasmine Gardner reports on how to sort out who’s real and who’s not 
15 October 2012

According to the web, I am one per cent fake. I’m also 90 per cent good — or at least, that’s my make-up on Twitter.

StatusPeople is a web tool that gives you the real picture of your follower score on Twitter — telling you how many of your followers are humans, how many are spam robots and how many are inactive accounts. Fortunately for me, I seem to be clean.

But when it launched in August, it started to reveal the identity of those who might have bought their followers — paying one of the many services which will ply your account with thousands of spam bots (spam accounts run by a computer, rather than a human) for a small fee. Plenty of high-profile Twits have been accused of these dodgy dealings (or Twitter “gaming” as it is known) — including Mitt Romney (who gained 100,000 followers over the course of a weekend in July) and writer and former Tory MP Louise Mensch, whom StatusPeople identified as having 97 per cent fake followers. Both denied having paid for them.

“The tool is relatively accurate,” says Rob Waller, co-founder of the London start-up. “It’s built for the majority of Twitter users — the 97 per cent who have fewer than 100,000 followers ... Where it becomes less accurate is for celebrity accounts. Lady Gaga, for example, has 30 million followers and you can’t possibly analyse the data quickly enough, so it will only take the last 100,000 followers to have come on board and tell you how good they are.”

Some pay-for-follower services can get around even this. Instead of providing bot followers, they follow large numbers of real people on your behalf in the hope they will follow back, before un-following. Tory chairman Grant Shapps has previously been accused of this behaviour.

Yet equally, a high proportion of bots and fakes is not a certain indication of foul play. “The more notable a person, the more spam they tend to attract, which we think may be related to phishing activity [attempts to get replies that reveal personal information],” says Waller.

And then there’s the stitch-up. Milo Yiannopoulos, editor in chief of London-based online tech magazine The Kernel, blogged back in July that someone had sent 20,000 bots out to get him. “I discovered yesterday when, in apparent retaliation for one of our articles, someone pointed a gaming service at my personal Twitter account and gifted me 20,000 bogus followers,” he wrote.

Buying Twitter followers can not only be used to boost your own profile, but to damage others — by plying them with fakers and giving the rest of the Twitterverse the impression that they’re buying friends and influence.

Yiannopoulos later added this update: “They’ve just done it again. I now have more than 40,000 bogus followers, placing me comfortably in the big leagues of follower gamers … Help!”

He is not the only victim. “Someone who was annoyed with our site purchased some fake followers as a result,” says StatusPeople co-founder, Rob Waller. “It may have been a few people as the site received about 40,000 [bots] and they bought 20,000 for me personally.”

Fortunately for Waller, Twitter recently had a major spam purge, which got rid of most of Waller’s fakes.

“Probably about 80 per cent of them have now gone because Twitter seems to have dumped a lot of spam recently ,” he says.

Intermittently Twitter does a mass clean-up, at which point many users see their follower counts dip dramatically — which is a relief, because once you know how many spammers you’ve attracted, getting rid of them can be an altogether trickier proposition.

Blocking spambots manually is one solution — it will mean they can no longer slough @replies into your mentions tab and also that they can’t follow you. A web tool called Twitblock (twitblock.org) can scan your followers and give you a list of probable spammers to block — as will StatusPeople’s paid-for dashboard.

If you have more than a few hundred followers this is going to take you some time. If you have tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — then see you next month, because you’ve got a busy (and boring) schedule ahead.

Fortunately, StatusPeople may be launching the solution soon. By the start of next month it hopes to provide a tool that automatically and continuously scans your followers and strips out the fakes.

Soon, we can be 100 per cent “good” again.

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