Are your Twitter followers real?

What if a large percentage of your followers weren’t real? What if they were just computer generated followers using bots, spiders, crawlers, scrapers, sniffers … Pretty unsavoury that. Fake accounts run by computers.

Earlier this year Baracuda Labs published a study called The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business – A study on Dealers, Abusers and fake Twitter Accounts. It revealed some interesting statistics. The going rate for purchasing fake followers at the time was $18.00 per 1,000 followers. Out of the 72,212 accounts analysed there were 11,283 ‘abusers’ – those who had acquired for themselves at least 470 fake followers.

Are these little digital beasties a threat to social media? Does it matter anyway?

If you look at the influence of social media in society today, both in our social culture and in a business context, the answer is yes. Those who actively procure fake followers tend to do so to promote themselves in search and gain a higher influence. With higher influence come other benefits, like advertising revenue streams. The Baracuda Labs survey found that 75 per cent of abusers (those who buy fake followers) have set a URL in their profiles (compared to 31 per cent for random Twitter users). This URL is used to sell advertising. Those who suffer fake following will often follow back manually, view the profile, click the URL and then see the advertising. They are also often subjected to @ spam.

So what’s to be done? As with all new tech evolutions and the policing of behaviours triggered by them, it’s very much business solution first, legal sanctions second.

For some time now those in advertising and marketing have been keen to use digital influencers as partners when promoting a product or brand. The number of followers gave a good indication of the power of influence.

Because of the problem of fake followers, new business models are springing up to combat this and actually enable an analysis of whether followers are fake or not. But these models are going further than that, developing algorithms that can actively score social media influence (and thereby negate volume based bots, etc). For example, Kred is a platform which can do real time analysis - you can see if people are trying to artificially increase their Kred score and undertake a qualitative analysis of their social media influence on a wider basis. Kred not only analyses influence but outreach: how generous a user is in their community to others. It does so on the basis of transparent rules to prevent bias.

Twitter’s terms of service do deal with the issue of bots, etc, specifically prohibiting unless permitted – that’s not controversial, because the Twitter API is revenue generating for Twitter. Technologically Twitter can also defend itself using the Robots Exclusion Protocol – essentially a standard file which it places on its servers called robots.txt which acts like a digital bouncer to robots and only letting the good bots, etc, in.

Twitter also holds the strong legal cards to deal with the problem, both contractually by enforcing its terms of service and by being able to make claims for the infringement of its user database. In fact the Twitter terms of service and underlying rules are full of terms to stop bots, etc, and fake followers.

What can you do if you have been the subject of fake followers? You can report to Twitter using a very simple process. If the fake followers are spamming you, then this is separately an infringement of your privacy rights – you have not opted in to receive spam from the fake followers.

But the moral of the story is really this: think before you Tweet and think before you follow. According to Baracuda Labs, the average fake Twitter account is following 1,799 people. You can’t really prevent the rise of the machines, but you can try to control how easy you make it for them.

Vanessa Barnett is a technology and media partner, Charles Russell LLP. She tweets @vanessabarnett.