Buying Twitter Followers

I've noticed an increasing phenomenon on Twitter of late, which when I tweeted about it, seemed to get some interest.  It's people buying followers.

What do I mean?

Well it says what it does on the tin.  There are plenty of internet sites that "sell" followers.  Here's one.  As you see, you can buy anywhere between 1000 followers for $14 and 100,000 followers for $487:

These are not "real" people, however: a company sets up thousands of accounts with random (and sometimes ridiculous sounding) names, a profile and picture, and the accounts follow people who pay for the privilege.  The accounts have a few fairly meaningless tweets to make them look genuine, and don't have any, or many, followers.  They simply exist to boost "real" users' follower numbers.

Here's a sample "bought" follower:

They are incredibly easy to spot: less than 50 tweets, they follow 1000 or more accounts, and they start off with 0 followers, that may edge up to somewhere around 10 over time because of SpamBots auto-following them.  They themselves are not SpamBots (which promote products): they are just fake accounts used to follow people.  Their tweets never seem to show any interaction with other Twitter users.

How to Spot Someone with Bought Followers

This is also really very easy.  The first example I noticed was a Conservative councillor on Braintree District Council in Essex.  He was very young, newly elected, followed less than 1000 people himself, but had around 15,000 followers.  I found it impressive that he had amassed so many followers, but odd given his tweets really weren't terribly interesting or insightful to me*.

Then I began noticing more and more people following say 300 or 400 people themselves, but with 15,000 or 20,000 followers.  These are non-celebs: "ordinary" people if you like.  One of them was someone I followed and I noticed his follower count shoot up from 7,000 to 14,000 in the space of a month.  The penny dropped.  He must have bought them.

How to check?  Pull up the person's follower list.  If you see dozens of examples, in a block, of names such as "Chica Faulknor", with a few dozen tweets, who follow over 1000, and have a handful of followers themselves - and you've got a fairly good chance the person bought them.

Why Do It?

Well, the obvious reason must be to make yourself look more popular and/or interesting than you are.  When you go to follow a new person, they may be flattered, think "oh someone popular or important has followed me" and then follow back.  In this way, you are of course more likely to pick up genuine followers.  Sadly I've specifically noticed younger gay men being the people who seem to be doing the buying.  They presumably want to "look cool" and popular and think this is a way to achieve it.  Appearance seems to be particularly important to them.  This is hardly breaking news of course.

Look good, be hot, be popular!

There may be another reason.  Someone I know recently told me he was considering buying 10,000 followers.  I laughed and asked why.  His response was that he'd complained to a Rail Company about poor service, and that if they saw he had thousands of followers, they were more likely to take him and his complaint seriously.  The concern would obviously be that if he RTd unflattering comments, they would be worried about their reputation much more than if someone with 20 followers did the same.  Of course the RT would go to fake accounts and no one would read the tweet, but they are not to know this.  Followers effectively gives influence (or the appearance of it).

[Please see the footnote below for the aspect of politicians etc doing this]

Who Cares?

This blog isn't particularly intended to judge.  It is simply to explain something that I've noticed going on and to explain to quite a few people who asked me what the phenomenon is.

There are obviously some who would say that being "caught" doing so is social death on a networking medium like Twitter.  Others would say Twitter is just harmless fun, and who cares? 

A community like Twitter definitely does rely on a certain amount of trust between its users.  When fakes are exposed it does/can create lasting effects (regular readers will be familiar with a couple of my previous blog entries including the infamous fake government advisor Lord Credo).  Many people will perceive it as somewhat dishonest to buy followers, whatever the intent.  I am also reminded of a court case (nope I can't remember what it is called) which I seem to remember said it was okay to call yourself a Lord, even if you weren't one, as long as you didn't use it to obtain a financial advantage - in which case it becomes fraud and a criminal offence.  I also seem to remember that using a false title to get a table reservation at a fashionable restaurant was not considered to be a crime, however, as the meal was paid for and no loss was suffered by the restaurant owners.

Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.. aka Imposter Anna Anderson

It seems to me that if you are vain enough only to follow back people with high numbers of followers, without actually checking out whether their tweets are interesting, you only have yourself to blame for having "fallen" for this.  This is akin to the restaurant reservation example.  (Also, of course, you can unfollow at any time if the popular tweeter actually turns out to be very dull, so the ruse might not work too well in practice.)  The tweeter, unlike Anna Anderson, simply looks like they have lots of "real" followers that they do not, and the actual harm isn't obviously great.

The Rail Company example I gave above is interesting.  If they are give you good customer service simply because they are worried you might RT a genuine failure on their part, my take is that this is their own fault - and anything that encourages a service provider to act properly is fine by me.  However, this concept clearly falls flat on its face if everyone (or even a high proportion of people) on Twitter buys 10,000 followers.

Likewise, like it or not, someone's number of followers and their follower/following ratio is an obvious (if not entirely accurate) indication of how interesting/ amusing/ "follow worthy" they may be.  It would be annoying to most users if every dull and vacuous tweeter bought thousands of followers, and this destroyed this easy way of assessing who it is at least worth giving a try out with a follow.

Food For Thought

It's all food for thought, anyway, isn't it?  Next time you come across a non-celeb with a very high follower/following ratio, just pause for a moment and realise you may be having a mild Anastasia moment.  If it makes them feel good, I guess, so what... it's not something I would do, and it may genuinely get very annoying if it catches on as a trend, however.

Twitter truly is an interesting and frequently odd place!




*Footnote:

It seems the subscriptions for "bought" followers may only last for a certain period.  Look at this chart of the followers of Stephen Canning, the young Tory whom I mentioned above, over the last 3 months.  He is an elected councillor on Braintree District Council and the chair of the youth wing of the Conservative Party in Essex. 

The graph shows a drop of over 100,000 on a single day (27 June 2012) this year.  That would have to be a fairly disastrous day's tweeting to lose so many genuine followers, unless in fact these were bought followers for whom the subscription had run out, or the "owner" had decided he had better ditch them because it was too obvious and it might be noticed:

The aspect of elected officials, specifically Tories, buying followers was explored by Sunny Hundal here at the Liberal Conspiracy site.  I think they are in a whole other category again to the "ordinary" user who buys followers.  I would not be happy at all to vote for anyone who thinks it is harmless fun to use cash to deliberately mislead people into thinking they have greater influence than they do, be that on Twitter or elsewhere.  I also believe more stringent standards of honesty should and must apply to those in public office, or indeed to those seeking it, such as the candidate for the Police and Crime commissioner mentioned there, whom I also used to follow.