Twitter Jitters

January 27, 2018 12:04 PM

Inside Social Media's Black Market. "The price difference has allowed Mr. Calas to build a small fortune, according to company records. In just a few years, Devumi sold about 200 million Twitter followers to at least 39,000 customers, accounting for a third of more than $6 million in sales during that period."

" Twitter has not imposed seemingly simple safeguards that would help throttle bot manufacturers, such as requiring anyone signing up for a new account to pass an anti-spam test, as many commercial sites do. As a result, Twitter now hosts vast swaths of unused accounts, including what are probably dormant accounts controlled by bot makers."

"Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked on security and user safety at Twitter before leaving in late 2015, said, 'Twitter as a social network was designed with almost no accountability.' Some critics believe Twitter has a business incentive against weeding out bots too aggressively. Over the past two years, the company has struggled to generate the user growth seen by rivals like Facebook and Snapchat. And outside researchers have disputed the company’s estimates for how many of its active users are actually bots."

posted by storybored (29 comments total)

Your periodic reminder that Twitter has not had a full time CEO since for two and a half years now. They also just lost their COO who reportedly was running a lot of day to day stuff.
posted by Nelson at 12:34 PM on January 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

I bought 1000 followers last year. They gave me 3000 at first, but they've been dropping off and now I've got about 1300, of which about 600 are 'real' and 700 are the ones I bought, so it was still a pretty good deal for the USD 0.99 it cost.
posted by signal at 1:02 PM on January 27, 2018

And the reason I bought followers is because I mainly use twitter to get customer service from companies. They answer faster if they think you're an 'influencer'.
posted by signal at 1:03 PM on January 27, 2018 [51 favorites]

Previously, an old comment of mine
posted by bigendian at 1:08 PM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

bought 1000 followers last year.

I’d tut at that but there’s a hell of a lot of nazis and Russian bot nets and worthless support people and a guy called @jack whose really into the Nazis and Russians to tut at first.
posted by Artw at 1:11 PM on January 27, 2018

And the reason I bought followers is because I mainly use twitter to get customer service from companies. They answer faster if they think you're an 'influencer'.

That's really interesting, but it's also kind of depressing that it takes these kinds of maneuvers to get a basic level of customer service.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:11 PM on January 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

And the reason I bought followers is because I mainly use twitter to get customer service from companies. They answer faster if they think you're an 'influencer'.

This is weird to me, because if I so much as accidentally mention a company’s name in passing on Twitter, I get them @ing me within minutes asking what they can do for me.
posted by Jimbob at 1:38 PM on January 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

so basically much of our social media is fake media, even more than we already thought

just how long do people think the world can be run on lies?
posted by pyramid termite at 1:39 PM on January 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Should say, while Twitter the company has, as this post shows, utterly failed to do anything to limit bots because of their obsession with user number growth, I’m constantly surprised at how naïve users continue to be.

Why, why do people earnestly engage with and get in arguments with accounts with handles like @nigel726282736 with no avatar and 7 tweets and 2 followers?
posted by Jimbob at 1:42 PM on January 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

Well, someone has to show those bots who's boss.
posted by snwod at 1:44 PM on January 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

> Artw:"bought 1000 followers last year…
I’d tut at that but there’s a hell of a lot of nazis and Russian bot nets and worthless support people and a guy called @jack whose really into the Nazis and Russians to tut at first."

I also have an Apple computer, wear Nikes, drive a gas-powered car and am leaving for a vacation tomorrow taking a jet plane, so on the scale of evil, socially irresponsible things I do, buying twitter followers is like #363.
posted by signal at 1:46 PM on January 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

> Jimbob:
"if I so much as accidentally mention a company’s name in passing on Twitter, I get them @ing me within minutes asking what they can do for me."

I live in Chile, where 'customer service' is a strange, foreign, semi-communist concept.
posted by signal at 1:48 PM on January 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

Metafilter: On the scale of evil, socially irresponsible things I do, buying twitter followers is like #363.
posted by the painkiller at 2:11 PM on January 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

> This is weird to me, because if I so much as accidentally mention a company’s name in passing on Twitter, I get them @ing me within minutes asking what they can do for me.

Yeah, but you already have a thousand followers.
posted by glonous keming at 2:41 PM on January 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

just how long do people think the world can be run on lies?

I mean a possibly senile, definitely racist old man was elected head of the most powerful nation on earth a tick over a year ago and his entire platform was made up of lies so what makes you think it's not going to work?
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 4:09 PM on January 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

just how long do people think the world can be run on lies?
The World, or at least America, has been "run on lies" since well before I was born. If it weren't, the stock market would still be crawling at near-1929 valuations and the entire 'tech' industry would not exist (as well as 90%+ of All Media).
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:42 PM on January 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

@RichEisen: "Proud to say I’ve built up my Twitter following through years of spending countless hours on my phone, generally shirking responsibilities and diligently exhibiting anti-social behavior around family, friends and co-workers but never once by buying them."
posted by riruro at 6:54 PM on January 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

posted by signal at 4:03 PM on January 27 [26 favorites −] [

Hmmm...
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:27 PM on January 27, 2018 [15 favorites]

the most powerful nation on earth bought followers, is that what I'm hearing nowadays? All of this, when it dies down, will provide fodder for researchers on questions of what is power and what is influence and what is scale, reach, and engagement.
posted by infini at 9:32 PM on January 27, 2018

Vox: New York attorney general launches investigation into bot factory after Times exposé: Louise Linton, Randy Bryce, and Clay Aiken all bought fake Twitter followers from a company called Devumi.

GOP atwitter over report that Paul Ryan challenger Randy Bryce bought fake Twitter followers

This is frustrating to discover as Bryce has been fundraising on his healthy 200K+ Twitter following, even though most of it seems to have been from those bought bots and a bunch bequeathed from former candidate (and non-Wisconsin resident) David Yankovich, who seems to at least have earned his own Twitter following before briefly jumping into the race, then endorsing Bryce. The primary isn't for months, though, and the media have given scant attention to the other Democratic candidate, Cathy Myers *, and she's even had people attacking her for "taking votes from the Democrat" -- because they are apparently unaware (thanks to this uncritical coverage) that she is his PRIMARY opponent! By comparison, she has 80% parity with him in terms of Facebook followers. In the end, it does seem likely that if he gets the nomination this will be one of several lines of attack used against him, even if his actual Twitter Audit numbers are fairly solid. Anyway, just an alternate illustration of how the bot angle can distort actual politics.

* I'm involved with her campaign and a personal friend, so won't link, but you can find her via my own Twitter if so inclined.
posted by dhartung at 12:26 AM on January 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Jacobin Magazine is on the list - even the commies are replacing The Workers with robots.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 3:58 AM on January 28, 2018

This is frustrating to discover as Bryce has been fundraising on his healthy 200K+ Twitter following, even though most of it seems to have been from those bought bots and a bunch bequeathed from former candidate (and non-Wisconsin resident) David Yankovich, who seems to at least have earned his own Twitter following before briefly jumping into the race, then endorsing Bryce.

Bryce always struck me as a little ...performative?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:24 AM on January 28, 2018

so basically much of our social media is fake media, even more than we already thought

just how long do people think the world can be run on lies?

What a wonderful world we could have if everyone could just try that whole honesty thing.

But people get competitive and silly. I don't fret over my social media numbers because I have no independent way of verifying it, and I don't get jealous, either.

Social media was marketed as some sort of answer to everything, and it's not. It turned ideas into white noise, and then you have people using feints and ruses to stand out. It must be terribly scary being a "celebrity" these days -- you live and die by the now inert press; so your career depends on the number of "followers" you have, and you have to buy fake followers, and you have to hire someone else to write your tweets in case a real person sees it and becomes offended and/or disillusioned. So you have a ghostwriter and fake followers.

Do you thank your fake followers at the Oscars? Do they become your imaginary friends? Do your fake followers have to troll you for you to generate some fake publicity for yourself when your career lags?

The lies of 2018 aren't just destructive -- they're just really, really weird, and not even a fun weird.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 7:00 PM on January 28, 2018

I did read the fine article but I think I missed the part that explained how the reporter(s) got hold of the presumably confidential sales records of Devuni.
posted by Umami Dearest at 9:50 PM on January 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Vox: New York attorney general launches investigation into bot factory after Times exposé: Louise Linton, Randy Bryce, and Clay Aiken all bought fake Twitter followers from a company called Devumi.

I'm admittedly exhausted and deeply depressed by current affairs and thus easily distracted, but:

It seems like the city or state of NY launches an investigation or lawsuit about some aspect of corporate pestilence on an almost weekly basis - do they ever come to anything substantive?
posted by ryanshepard at 7:18 AM on January 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

2018 hasn't even gotten off the ground and all social is faked while the panopticon is now looking up its own ass.
posted by infini at 7:36 AM on January 29, 2018

I did read the fine article but I think I missed the part that explained how the reporter(s) got hold of the presumably confidential sales records of Devuni.

Yeah, I was super interested in that too because the level of detail is pretty incredible. It's buried pretty deep in the article, but the gist is disgruntled ex-contractor + lawsuit = tons of disclosures:

Dozens of Devumi’s customer service and order fulfillment personnel are based in the Philippines, according to company records. Employing overseas contractors may have helped Mr. Calas hold down costs. But it also appears to have left him vulnerable to a kind of social identity theft himself.

Last August, Mr. Calas sued Ronwaldo Boado, a Filipino contractor who previously worked for Devumi as an assistant customer support manager. After being fired for squabbling with other members of his team, Mr. Boado took control of a Devumi email account listing more than 170,000 customer orders, Mr. Calas alleged in court papers. Then Mr. Boado created a fake Devumi. (Some details of the lawsuit and of Devumi were previously reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.)

And here's a link to the previous reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
posted by mhum at 10:56 AM on January 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Author Celeste Ng has posted a thread about a sort of fascinating aspect to bots/people with huge numbers of twitter followers:

I recently got an email from someone claiming to be an assistant to a celebrity, noting his large social media following, and asking if I'd send autographed copies of my books. "I'm sure he'd post about them on social media!" says the assistant.

A couple things raise flags for me. First, I have never heard of this celebrity. Okay, I'm not the most up-to-date person, so I google. Have never heard of any of this person's listed work.

Not a dealbreaker. But the assistant's email address... is a Yahoo address. Again, not definitely a sign of something wrong, but unusual.

I look up the celebrity. Sure enough, he has 200K+ followers and a blue check mark. But then I look closer.

I mean, it goes where you think it's going, but it's kind of crazy how obvious it is. They're not even trying to hide it.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:02 PM on January 29, 2018

> It seems like the city or state of NY launches an investigation or lawsuit about some aspect of corporate pestilence on an almost weekly basis - do they ever come to anything substantive?

If this is a serious question, then yes, the New York attorney general is one of the most visibly powerful consumer protection enforcers in the country. You can peruse their press releases if you want to see what they've been working on. Some of them are just "AG sues X" as you say, but many of them are announcements of large settlements or penalties, or occasionally prison sentences.
posted by Syllepsis at 12:31 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]