Story First, Data Second

(If you prefer data first, tap/click here)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve read The New York Times’ investigative report, “The Follower Factory.” The piece takes a deep dive into buying fake/bot Twitter followers. I, too, have some experience with fake/bot Twitter followers. I have a story. I have some data.

I suppose a good place to start would be this tweet from Stanford professor, Johan Ugander — it is part of a tweetstorm connected to “The Follower Factory” and I would encourage you to read the thread in its entirety:

Writing a post about fake/bot Twitter accounts is something I have put off for far too long. I can relate to the hypothetical scenario Johan describes, as I was targeted in this fashion a couple of years ago. Discovering that tweet was the nudge I needed to finally tackle this post (thanks, Johan!).

In Jan 2016 I noticed my Twitter account was gaining followers at a ridiculous rate:

I am certain that my account was “maliciously [targeted by] someone with bot followers to make [me] look bad.”

Let me explain.

Attack Of The Bots

A few days prior to the surge in Twitter followers, I tweeted the following:

MeVee came out of nowhere, launching a live video app in early 2016, in what was a very hot sector at the time. MeVee’s Twitter following (15K+) was an immediate red flag for me — considering they had just launched — so I decided to manually review the account’s most recent Twitter followers. After encountering what appeared to be mainly fake/bot accounts, I ran the account through TwitterAudit. TwitterAudit most certainly isn’t perfect, but I have been impressed with their accuracy (more on that later). As I suspected, TwitterAudit revealed that the majority (93%) of MeVee’s Twitter followers were fake.

Why would a recently launched app purchase Twitter followers? The answer is simple: social proof (i.e. having more Twitter followers can impact the perception of MeVee).

To their credit, MeVee replied to my tweet rather than ignoring it:

MeVee’s Twitter account has changed its handle from @MeVeeApp to @buildwithcrane. The account is now associated with Crane AI, which has nothing to do with live video (MeVee no longer exists)

The response (“someone early on accidentally bought some followers”) gave me a good laugh. Several people named in The New York Times’ report similarly pointed the finger elsewhere (employees, family, agents, PR companies, friends) when confronted.

While I cannot definitively say it was someone with MeVee ties who targeted my account, what I can definitively say is that I did not purchase the followers. It very easily could have been a third party who came across our Twitter exchange and thought it would be funny to flood my account with fake/bot followers. In any case, the culprit’s identity isn’t central to the story/data I am sharing.

Ultimately anyone can purchase fake/bot Twitter followers to your Twitter account. Did you know that?

Whereas a few days earlier I was recommending tools to facilitate MeVee’s removal of fake/bot Twitter followers, I now found myself in a position where my Twitter account was being “maliciously [targeted by] someone with bot followers to make [me] look bad.”

At the time, I was working as a live video content creator/consultant. It was work that I truly enjoyed, especially when it involved travel, as was the case when I partnered with Heineken during the Rio Olympic games, for example:

Working as an “influencer” (I much prefer “creator”), I took great pride in ensuring that my Twitter following was clean/legit. In other words, I didn’t want my account to be followed by fake/bot Twitter accounts, which has the potential to be bad for business.

Savvier marketers are vetting/analyzing the audiences of the creators with whom they partner beyond simply looking at reach (i.e. number of followers). Most marketers, however, aren’t employing sophisticated processes to ensure they stay clear of partners who knowingly game the system via purchasing social followers/engagements. My desire to maintain a clean/legit Twitter following was driven by necessity. I didn’t want to lose out on any work because of the appearance that I was falsely representing my reach/influence.

Ever since I joined Twitter (March 2009), in fact — and well before I got into live video — I would regularly review my followers to ensure they were real accounts. As a result, I can confidently say that I probably have more Twitter accounts blocked than you! (~3.3K accounts, to be precise)

Influencer marketing is utterly broken, by the way, but I’ll save that for a future post.

Well, Shit. This Sucks

It didn’t take long for me to realize my Twitter account was (as far as I am concerned) being attacked by fake/bot accounts.

After becoming frustrated with blocking endless fake/bot accounts from following, I opted to change my settings to “Protect [my] Tweets.” When signing up for Twitter, tweets are public by default and anyone can follow any account. When tweets are protected, people must make a request to follow. Hence switching my account to private would alleviate the burden of blocking accounts.

Protecting tweets isn’t an ideal solution as tweets from private accounts can only be seen by followers. This limits visibility, and, by extension hinders engagement/interaction. Another downside to having a private account is that your tweets can no longer be retweeted. Twitter functions as a fantastic vehicle to amplify content (via discovery/retweets), however that value cannot be captured by private Twitter accounts. Being limited to utilizing Twitter within the framework of a private network vastly degrades both utility and user experience. Having a private account meant I could no longer leverage Twitter effectively.

Next, I pinged several Twitter employees to see if they could offer advice/solutions. The takeaway from those exchanges was this: don’t worry about the fake/bot followers, as Twitter regularly scrubs their ecosystem and fake/bot accounts will be removed, eventually. I also filed a ticket with Twitter’s Help Center, but didn’t receive a response (worth noting that neither a ticket number nor confirmation email were provided).

Soon thereafter I switched my account back to public, giving Twitter the benefit of the doubt. Over the next several weeks my Twitter account grew from ~4.6K followers to ~11.7K “followers” (Jan 7th 2016 through Jan 29th 2016):

Source: TwitterCounter.com (Feb ‘18)

More than two years later, I am still waiting for thousands of fake/bot accounts to be removed from Twitter/my follower list.

Enough With The Story, Let’s Get To The Data

(Take me back to the story)

As I will illustrate — and by applying multiple approaches/tools — it is relatively easy to identify fake/bot Twitter accounts. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, Twitter is actually quite effective at identifying spam accounts.

According to Nick Bilton (author of “Hatching Twitter”): “Twitter knew about all its fake followers, and always has — eliminating just enough bots to make it seem like they care, but not enough that it would affect the perceived number of active users on the platform.”

Upon closer inspection of what takes place under Twitter’s hood, it becomes apparent that Nick’s assertion perfectly describes Twitter’s approach to dealing with fake/bot accounts.

1) Network Graph Representation