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...