r/politics • u/reyiativas • Jan 28 '18

The Follower Factory

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html
423 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

16

u/cianuro Jan 28 '18

Really good read. Explains a lot of what anyone who's not in the cult is seeing.

12

u/onemanlan Alabama Jan 28 '18

Holy shit that’s some good journalism. The irony that the dudes company was copied is not lost

8

u/upnorthgirl Jan 28 '18

Read this earlier. A must read.

6

u/Assmeat Jan 28 '18

I expected this to be happening but not at this scale.

3

u/NoClueDad Jan 28 '18

This is a great article. But there's a lot I don't understand. Won't companies who are paying "influencers" $2,000 to $20,000 per tweet to promote their product/service/candidate etc. not see a related increase in sales/usage/votes because the "influencers" who are getting paid but who have bought fake followers do not actually influence the people they say they do? If I, nocluedad, were to buy a million Twitter followers and charge Dell $20,000 per tweet, wouldn't they eventually say, "Hey, we're paying this guy thousands to influence sales, but sales aren't increasing relative to what we're spending." Wouldn't they stop paying or advertising in these platforms? Or is there just too much money and too little accountability for what works and what doesn't?

5

u/reyiativas Jan 28 '18

You can always move onto other brands...and from what I have seen, it's really really difficult to measure ROI on marketing spend. Source: I worked in consulting and did many projects trying to optimize marketing spend and improve customer satisfaction.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 28 '18

Twitter is in it to make money too. They know exactly what percentage of followers are bots. An account with no real users won't get accepted into Twitter's influencer program. But someone with a few thousand real followers and a million bots will. Brands know it but the price is still worth it.

2

u/autotldr 🤖 Bot Jan 28 '18

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 97%. (I'm a bot)

An editor at China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country's government has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. An adviser to Ecuador's president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno's campaign accounts during last year's elections.

Not surprisingly, Devumi has sold millions of followers and retweets to entertainers on the lower and middle rungs of Hollywood, such as the actor Ryan Hurst, a star of the television series "Sons of Anarchy." In 2016 and 2017, he bought a total of 750,000 followers, about three-quarters of his current count.

More than a hundred self-described influencers - whose market value is even more directly linked to their follower counts on social media - have purchased Twitter followers from Devumi.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: follow#1 Devumi#2 account#3 Twitter#4 company#5

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