Questionnaire results

These are the results to our questionnaire in chart format with percentages underneath. The questionnaire was created in an attempt to judge how successful this project has been.

The story of Thomas Montgomery & Brian Barrett

The story of Thomas Montgomery & Brian Barrett is an odd one. We did some research into it and it proves unless you've met the person you are talking to online or have video chatted with them, how do you really know who you are talking to?

Barrett, 22, was an aspiring industrial arts teacher, an accomplished high school athlete who'd coached Little League all summer and helped his father coach soccer. Quiet and unassuming is how those who knew him described the Buffalo State College student. This was until he was shot dead when he had finished a shift at Dynabrade Corp.

Barrett's 47-year-old co-worker and friend, Thomas Montgomery, was charged with Barrett's murder. The motive, said investigators, was jealousy over Barrett's budding Internet relationship with the same 18-year-old woman Montgomery had been wooing since the previous year.

What neither man knew was that the woman was really a 40-something West Virginia mother who was using her daughter's identity to attract Internet suitors. She stated afterwards she would never have met either man

Makes you think doesn't it… We would love to hear some of your feedback on this story, please leave comments below.

Which is real?

Do you think you would have been able to tell which ones were fake? All look scarily real if you ask us… sometimes its harder to tell if an account is fake on Twitter due to lack of pictures and personal information!

Other social media platforms

Today we looked into the use of fake profiles on different social media platforms. The two we looked at were apps available on the iPhone called Snapchat and Tinder.

Snapchat is an app that allows you to send images to people that you add but only for up to 10 seconds and then the image disappears. Now why would anybody create a fake account on this social media platform when the whole point of it is to send pictures of yourself to one another. After looking into it, it seems the fake accounts are created to spam Snapchat users. These spam chats as they have started to be called are usually of naked images of women. While the photo may vary, each snap includes the caption, “Add me on KIK for nudes swap ;)” along with a username on Kik Messenger, an instant messaging application for mobile devices. The idea we guess being that some gullible users downloading the messenger service and spending money on it therefore making the creators of the fake accounts money.


The second app we looked at is called Tinder. A profile appears on screen with images of a person, the app allows the user to anonymously like or pass them. If two users like each other then it results in a "match" and Tinder introduces the two users and opens a chat. So again, why would anybody go through with the effort to create a fake profile unless its money motivated? 

When we looked into it it seems that similarly to Snapchat the fake profiles encourage users to sign up to pornagraphic website/ messenger services which cost them money. However it appears Tinder is also being used to encourage users to download mobile games which again, cost money. This is arguably a clever way of advertising, using a fake account of a good looking woman to encourage naive men into downloading the game. Therefore we think the use of fake accounts in this instant is actually quite clever.

Fake Profile?

Again one of us as been added by an account which we are 100 percent sure is a fake profile.
The tell tale signs are all there, this profile has only 4 images on the whole account, they are all of the same person and there are no photos where they could have friends tagged in. The huge giveaway is the fact this account has 0 friends and we certainly don't know this person, so unless someone can vouch for him he is being rejected.

Let us know what you think by commenting below.. definitely a fake?

Real/ Fake Account tweets

We again tweeted off our Real / Fake accounts Twitter profile today. This time we tweeted an image of profile of somebody we know, so we know the profile is real.

We got a much better response this time, receiving interaction off of 9 Twitter users. 7 saying they thought the profile is real and 2 saying they thought it was fake. We found this interesting that there was a slight difference of opinion amongst our followers.

We wanted to further investigate as to why 2 of our followers thought the profile would be fake. After direct messaging these followers (one replied) they said they felt it could be a fake profile as they didn't state where they worked on their profile and all of the images that can be seen are group shots and none are of just the individual.

After researching fake profiles thoroughly we actually feel that group photos quite often mean that the individual is who they say they are, particularly if their friends are tagged in those images.

Parody Accounts

We have been looking into parody accounts and whether they can be deemed fake or not. Our initial thoughts were no they aren't, it is pretty obvious when an account is a parody by the tweets they send and the amount of followers the account has.

However when looking into the accounts, it seems they are becoming very popular with some parody accounts having over 1 million followers. One we particularly looked at was @Queen_UK, this account has 1.11 million followers, it's own website and merchandise. The account clearly suggests that its a parody by stating their location as 'fictional', not that you could imagine the queen using Twitter regularly in the first place.

There are so many parody accounts of celebrities out there but how is it that these celebrities don't mind that people create an account using their name and picture and begin sending tweets. We decided to look into Twitters terms and conditions as to why they don't shut down the accounts as they are impersonating somebody else. When looking at Twitters terms and conditions it states that they won't remove the account if :

• The user shares your name but has no other commonalities 
• The profile clearly states its not affiliated with or connected to any similarly named individuals

We concluded that the majority of these accounts don't actually do either of these things so therefore maybe Twitter should take greater action against these accounts, particularly if the person involved wants it removed.

First Tweets..

Today we posted our first tweets on our Real / Fake accounts Twitter profile. We posted out some tips to the few followers we have gained about being able to spot a fake account. We have also posted our first image of a profile, encouraging our followers to Retweet or Favourite the tweet depending on whether or not they felt the profile in the image was real or fake.

We received ok feedback from our followers with 3 people Favouriting the tweet saying they thought the profile was fake. They were correct.

Twitter Experiment

Today we set up a small experiment as part of our social media project. We have created a Twitter account which we have called Real / Fake accounts.

We aim to initially encourage our friends and family to give the account a follow and then hopefully we will get some other Twitter users to follow our account. Using this Twitter account we plan to post images of social media profiles. The idea being that our followers look at the image of the profile and decide whether its a legit person or whether its a fake account. Once they have decided we will encourage them to tweet us with what they think and the account can let them know if they are correct or not.

We hope to gain a small following at least and hopefully get some users to reply to the tweets we send and see if users can identify a fake account.

Why create a fake account?

We decided to look into why fake profiles follow who they do and why are they created in the first place. Our initial thoughts were, it could be somebody being nosey and wanting to look at your tweets but didn't want to follow you on their actual account. Another reason people create fake accounts is they like to create a different online identity as it makes them feel good using a different photo etc. However this would be on a small scale. 

Larger scale

Software to generate thousands of Twitter accounts is widely available. These programs send data to Twitter through proxy IP addresses, generate names and user names without the user going through Twitter at all (some will even scrape the information and pictures from random accounts and replicate profiles with a couple of random misspellings).

Large companies fake followers

Large companies could use the software we talked about in our last blog post to buy Twitter followers. Our initial thoughts were, why would they do this? Huge companies don't need followers to be known as they are already very well known. So are they buying the followers or does it just happen to be coincidence that the more followers you have, the more fake accounts will follow you.

 

Well this didn't appear to be the case when we Audited our own Twitter accounts as Josh has more followers but significantly less fake accounts following him than Sam.

We again used the Twitter Audit software online to look at two large companies that use Twitter, Sainsbury's and Vodafone. As you can see In the images, 32 percent of Sainsbury's followers are actually fake. Meaning although Sainsbury's have almost 75 thousand more followers than Vodafone, they actually only have 35 thousand more real followers. Now we aren't suggesting that either company does buy followers but to us it does seem a bit dubious that nearly one third of Sainsbury's followers aren't real, do they want to appear more popular than their rivals and that they actually are.

Phony Twitter Accounts

Phony Twitter accounts make up more of a presence online than most think. The black market for phony Twitter accounts could be up to $360 million a year. This black market purchasing of followers for money, takes place on websites such as eBay.

Why do people buy fake followers, you might ask? As a brand, the lack of results for all of your hard work on a social campaign could be frustrating. Fake Followers Erode Credibility Some believe if you buy a few fake followers then other real users will notice your brand or yourself due to the perceived increased following. Simply stated, the larger the number of followers an account has the more likely people are to pay attention to it. The problem is these fake followers haven’t been gained naturally at all, they don’t create engagement, and they don’t do your brand any good when it comes to needing a community to support it. These phony accounts are called follower-bots and are created to act as if they are a real person — spouting off tweets, following other users, and retweeting content. You’ve probably seen the more obvious follower-bots follow you on Twitter, but the people creating them are getting more and more advanced. These days, spotting a follower-bot can be nearly impossible. They even steal information from real accounts and duplicate it numerous times over to make them look real. If you look at this picture it shows how a follower-bot pulled info from a real account to make three fake ones.

Celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian have even been accused of buying a following. A month ago it was announced that Bieber reached 40 million followers. But soon a more accurate statistic surfaced.

After checking his account, it was estimated that:

• 44 percent of his current followers are fake

• 21 percent are inactive

• only 35 percent are considered “good.” So … more like 14 million Beliebers exist.

Twitter Audit

Today we were looking into fake followers on Twitter and why would you create a fake twitter accounts. We looked into a website called Twitter Audit which looks at your accounts followers and tells you how many of your followers are real genuine Twitter accounts and how many are fake.

We were surprised to see that Sam had 11 fake profiles following him compared to there only being 4 fake profiles following Josh even though he has more followers.

Change of plans

Today we had to slightly change our idea for our SMP. We were originally going to aim to create a short documentary about our investigations into the use of fake social media accounts and particularly focus on one individual and film it in a similar style to the TV show Catfish. However due to time constraints and the individual not being able to film anymore we have changed the idea to creating a Twitter account and potentially create a social media awareness poster. Further information will follow...