Twitter says that fake followers are just shy.



Contributing Writer
Twitter Photo: Vector Girl Credit: David Gotink


Twitter has an answer for StatusPeople’s fake follower tool.  Those aren’t fake followers you’re seeing – they’re just “shy.”

The New York Times ran an article last week detailing how the fake follower tool calculates that President Obama and Lady Gaga have a high proportion of fake followers.  Since then there have been a glut of derivative articles sharing the same narrative (it’s not entirely true by the way).  Given the circumstance, it’s understandable that Twitter would be defensive about the perceived lack of control over all of their fake accounts.  But truth told, purchased followers are so widely available that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to deny that they exist.  And purchased followers don’t disappear, so claiming that there is a misinterpreted group of users with bot-like, introverted tendencies is a bit silly.

Twitter also claims that they measure “frequency of logins” as a gauge for authenticity.  This doesn’t seem to hold muster, either.  A large number of fake accounts are generated and managed completely independent of the Twitter application.  Because we don’t see a decrease in followers for accounts that have likely bought followers (politicians for instance), it’s not likely that login frequency is a reliable indicator of anything.  If it were, Twitter would have weeded out bots better than they have.

Twitter’s shy-pothesis doesn’t really add up.

Twitter’s greatest hits

Add “fake followers are just shy” to Twitter’s greatest hits.  Right next to Dick Costolo’s “truckful of money,”  Costolo’s “What you’ll see us do more and more as a platform is allow third parties to build into Twitter.” and Michael Sippey’s “we want to make sure that the Twitter experience is straightforward and easy to understand.”

It’s tough to have a lot of faith in what Twitter says when they’re so often prone to exaggeration.  How refreshing would it be to have someone from Twitter admit: “we’re for sale, we’re cutting off all third party apps and we can’t reliably weed out spam?”  It would be refreshing, but maybe not assuring.

Faith in Twitter?

Adrian Covert wrote a phenomenal piece in Gizmodo this week entitled “Twitter needs to fix its own apps before it kills everyone else’s.”  It’s a spot-on analysis of the sad state of Twitter’s current tools to manage its own platform (it’s also far too generous to the mobile app).

The irony in Twitter’s posturing is that they have had some brilliant third-party developers contribute to make Twitter a much more useful platform than it would have otherwise been.  Would Twitter have summarily dismissed a tool like StatusPeople’s faker app two years?  I doubt it.

But this is 2012, and Twitter doesn’t need anyone’s help.  In this alternative universe, developers (and users to some extent) are the enemy, and spambots are simply shy, harmless apparitions who occasionally log in to Twitter to friend someone they met on Fiverr.

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Writer about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.

Your Employees Likely Hate Your Intranet: Here’s Why http://t.co/UyEgPD7LFJ via @ShellyKramer – 2 hours ago

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

  • http://www.impermium.com/ Candace

    Advertisers may ultimately force Twitter’s hand to get serious about, or at least acknowledge, fake followers. If Twitter can’t get accurate user data or maintain ad service trust/confidence in the ROI for sponsored ads, then the platform will be hurt not only in the press but in revenue.

  • http://twitter.com/claudialicher Claudia Licher

    I must respectfully disagree. First, StatusPeople did NOT identify a few accounts that follow me and which I view as fake followers. Second, I spent a few months without an image and with zero tweets before deciding to get active – and therefore visible. If you’ve been on Twitter since forever that may seem odd. But then you’re an early adopter whose mindset differs from the people who joined later.

  • jimdougherty

    Hi Claudia – thanks for reading and commenting! I don’t think that StatusPeople’s faker app is an infallible tool by any means, but it is generally understood that a large number of people join Twitter without tweeting. The criteria that most of these tools is a little more nuanced, as there is a specific range of tweets that they will generally use. I don’t claim to know the specifics that they use, but you make a great point about the shortfalls. That said, I’ve actually tweeted to some of these accounts and they are unmonitored. If Twitter was serious about eradicating them they could flag these accounts and ask for a verification of some sort. Incidentally, I’m not an early adopter of Twitter either – just a loss averse fan! Cheers!

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Candace! Spot on insight. Facebook is facing the same dilemma as a number of their clicks are said to be false. I have some doubt if Twitter can be more successful than Facebook in that regard! Cheers!

  • Outtanames999

    I don’t know. Unless you’re going to state exactly what metrics you propose to “prove” someone is real and not fake, you are just adding useless noise to the discussion. I’m not saying fake followers and fake profiles is not an interesting issue in social media. I do question how actionable or meaningful the insights are though.

    At the end of the day this is just VC bs that only the investors care about so they can up the valuation for next round because of some bs eyeball count. Yes FB and TW are just AOL all over again. We get that.

    But the reality is really very simple. In social media, you are what you are. You post what you post. Those who follow you, follow you and those who don’t, don’t. As the owner of the profile whether your followers are fake or not really doesn’t matter. What does matter is the engagement and you’re never going to get 100% participation or engagement with 100% of your followers in any given time period. Whether the rest didn’t participate because they are shy or fake really doesn’t matter. It’s the ones that do participate that matter, not the rest.

    As to valid metrics for “proof of life”, let’s look at some. Login in recency and frequency, password change recency, posting of profile updates and photo activity recency and frequency, whether the account has been phone verified via SMS or email verified, number of friends or connections, ad cick recency and frequency, whether permissions have been given to apps. Some or all of these and I’m sure many others could come in handy – but mostly as guidance to advertisers. Still at the end of the day, it’s going to be hard to distinguish between an account that is shy, one that is dormant but will be reawakened in the future, and one that is fake or one that is abandoned.

    Other than for purposes of boasting how many users one has, it’s really of little practical consequence. Operationally, the marginal cost of one additional profile, fake or not, is near zero. The advertiser really doesn’t care because you’re never going to reach 900 million FB users anyway and even if you could, you can’t afford it. Imagine if all 900 million did click on your ad. That would bust even the biggest budget.

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks so much for reading and for your thoughtful comment. I agree with you that it’s insignificant for any singular account, but I don’t think Twitter is intent to go through another VC round – this is all a precursor to going public. And I do think there is something inherently dishonest about claiming a percentage of users that don’t exist. Twitter could vet them out quite easily if they wanted to by sending verification notices to their “shy” followers. Good points all – my gratitude for your work to contribute these!

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