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Posted On: 01/30/2018 8:24:03 AM
Post# of 126984
The Follower Factory
Everyone wants to be popular online.
Some even pay for it.
Inside social media’s black market.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/2...-bots.html
Quote:
To better understand Devumi’s business, we became a customer. In April, The Times set up a test account on Twitter and paid Devumi $225 for 25,000 followers, or about a penny each. As advertised, the first 10,000 or so looked like real people. They had pictures and full names, hometowns and often authentic-seeming biographies. One account looked like that of Ms. Rychly, the young Minnesota woman.
But on closer inspection, some of the details seemed off. The account names had extra letters or underscores, or easy-to-miss substitutions, like a lowercase “L” in place of an uppercase “I.”
Everyone wants to be popular online.
Some even pay for it.
Inside social media’s black market.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/2...-bots.html
Quote:
To better understand Devumi’s business, we became a customer. In April, The Times set up a test account on Twitter and paid Devumi $225 for 25,000 followers, or about a penny each. As advertised, the first 10,000 or so looked like real people. They had pictures and full names, hometowns and often authentic-seeming biographies. One account looked like that of Ms. Rychly, the young Minnesota woman.
But on closer inspection, some of the details seemed off. The account names had extra letters or underscores, or easy-to-miss substitutions, like a lowercase “L” in place of an uppercase “I.”
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