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.