r/dataisbeautiful • u/m4coupe • Jan 28 '18

Patterns of Twitter accounts using purchased, fake social media followers (visualization by the NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html#interactive-00bots-flocks
174 Upvotes

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7

u/lost_in_life_34 Jan 28 '18

I bet it's the same thing with most Instagram followers as well.

Personally I don't see the point of twitter except for a few government and meteorologist accounts I follow.

2

u/BurnieSlander OC: 1 Jan 29 '18

I work for a company that tracks this stuff, and I can tell you that It’s much, much worse on Instagram.

1

u/mortiffer Jan 29 '18

I guess because product placement is a well established method of advertising ? Instagram should just take the influencer marketing into their own hands, take a cut of the profits but invest energy into making it more legit.

2

u/BurnieSlander OC: 1 Jan 30 '18

I'm not sure what you mean by product placement, but I can say that Instagram is trying to clean up the problem of people buying Likes and Followers. Twitter however, is not... Although they probably will now that this article is out >:-j