5:12PM BST 26 Aug 20123 Comments
Those keen at self-promotion are able to buy followers on the internet through dozens of websites but now a British company has developed a programme to identify fake users, exposing the scale of the deception.
Mervyn Barrett, a candidate for the post of Lincolnshire police and crime commissioner, appears to have high support among Brazilian porn stars and Argentinian fans of the singer Justin Bieber.
His Twitter account soared from 330 followers on June 28 to 17,014 by July 9, with his new followers largely from Latin America, southeast Asia and the United States.
A source close to Mr Barrettās campaign told the Sunday Times: āWe think perhaps it was the work of an over-enthusiastic supporter as Mervyn would never dream of doing something like this.ā
Louise Mensch, the former Conservative MP, has 40,000 fake followers, it has emerged. She has denied knowledge of the fake accounts and asked Twitter to remove them.
The number of followers of the US Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, jumped by more than 100,000 in one weekend, it emerged last month. The Romney campaign has denied it bought followers.
Campaigners for Newt Gingrich, who ran against Romney for the Republican nomination, denied that he paid for any of his 1.3 million-strong Twitter following.
One site called Fiverr is offering 1,000 Twitter followers for $5 while other sites include InterTwitter.com, BuyTwitterFollow.com and FanMeNow.com, selling Twitter followers by the thousands. Some also sell ālikesā on Facebook and āviewsā on YouTube views.
Twitter followers can either be bought as ātargetedā followers, harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them hoping they will recipricate, or āgeneratedā followers from Twitter accounts that are created by spamming computers, often referred to as ābots.ā
Now StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, has released an internet programme called the Fake Follower Check that can work out how many fake followers Twitter users have.
A āfakeā account is set up to follow people or send out spam and normally has no followers but follows large numbers of people, according to Rob Waller, founder of StatusPeople.
An āinactiveā account is one in which there has been no activity for a while which could be real, but consumes information rather than shares it, he said.
Almost every Twitter account has a small percentage of fake followers because anyone can follow a user, whether they are a genuine friend or a computer-generated account.
The tool analyses an account's 100,000 most recent followers, but Mr Waller said they hoped to improve its accuracy.
According to StatusPeople, 70 percent of President Obamaās nearly 19 million followers are āfakeā or āinactiveā along with 71 percent of Lady Gagaās nearly 29 million followers.
Only 37 per cent of David Cameronās two million followers were āgoodā, along with 30 per cent of Wayne Rooneyās five million followers. Ricky Gervais had only 34 per cent while Stephen Fry had 36 per cent and Alan Carr had 39 per cent. There is no suggestion that these individuals had any knowledge that their followers are fake or innactive.
One of the sites that sells followers, buyfollowerstwitter.co.u
k, was set up two months ago by an unemployed former accountant operating from a house in Warrington, Cheshire.
His website offers a range of packages from the āideal beginner packageā of 500 Twitter followers for Ā£13, to a bulk special of 200,000 for Ā£79.
āNow itās all set up, it only takes me about 10 to 15 minutes per order,ā he said. āI just sit there in my underpants for 10 minutes a day.ā
He buys the fake followers from an American wholesaler, Al Delgado, 28, from Brooklyn, New York, who runs FanMeNow.com, which makes an estimated $10,000 (Ā£6,300) a day.
Mr Delgado in turn says he buys his fake followers from Chirag, a 19-year-old student, who lives 20 minutes outside Delhi in India.
He purchases the ready-made fake profiles from online vendors based around Asia and then operates the software to make the accounts follow Delgadoās customers.
One million fake accounts cost Chirag about Ā£4,000, but he is earning enough money from selling them on as āfollowers-for-hireā to put himself through university.
Twitter filed a federal law suit in April against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers. The case is still pending.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9500730/Millions-of-fake-Twitter-accounts-boost-wannabe-celebrities.html
