Monday, August 20, 2012

BuzzFeed - Latest: Why You Should Kill Your Robot Twitter Followers

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thumbnail Why You Should Kill Your Robot Twitter Followers
Aug 20th 2012, 21:32

It's for the greater good. Of Twitter. And the internet. And it's kind of fun. Here's how to do it.

I've gotten sick of looking through my Twitter followers list and seeing it littered with people who follow tens of thousands of junk accounts. So over the past few months, I've been actively policing my new followers. Any user that follows me and is clearly a bot, or just looking for people to follow back, gets blocked and reported for spam. Random web design companies, auto repair shops, and fashion boutiques: reported for spam.

It seems I'm not alone. Recently StatusPeople, a social media management platform for businesses, launched a tool to find out how many of a user's followers are spam or inactive accounts. While their algorithm is far from perfect (based on only the most recent 500 followers for a given account), it's already being used to analyze the presidential race. People are beginning to wake up to the reality that anyone can gain a bunch of followers with fifty bucks and enough CPU cycles.

For those who aspire to some kind of fame, even Internet fame, Twitter looks like a great in. It is, in many senses, a meritocracy, with the smartest, funniest, or most interesting accounts eventually gaining a large following. But, unsurprisingly, many people were unsatisfied with their tiny feifdoms of followers on the social network. Armed with the early revelation that most users tended to follow back a percentage of those who followed them, these people set out to follow as many people as they could as a way of gaming the system. The process of following, however, was both laborious and excruciatingly boring.

Then someone wrote a script that automated it.

While the early hack developed by Danilo Salles above was probably one of many similar scripts written at the time, it was indicative of an early trend towards automated following. And even though Twitter originally limited people to following 2,000 people (and out-of-date support documents still say it does), the limit was lifted eventually, and the scripts became smart enough that they managed to avoid raising any red flags.

Mitt Romney recently made headlines when it was revealed that the spike of 150,000 new followers from July 20-23 was comprised of only 74% real people, compared with 90 percent for accounts of similar size [Romney denied buying followers]. How many of those followers not counted by The Atlantic as bots are just follow-back spammers, many of which target large accounts?


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