Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Bots... Bots everywhere!

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

All these accounts belong to customers of an obscure American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

I can't decide if this is funny, criminal, dangerous, or just SAD!

Without fake internet points how do we know who is WINNING?

Well, legally it is fraud and the proprietors may end in prison.

Which is nice!

Nope, it's all perfectly legal.

We live in an attention economy. A lot of decisions get made based on how many followers one has on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media.

The fact these numbers actually mean almost nothing is of no consequence. We've quantified social relationships, the majority of people do not understand the numbers are fake, and so those numbers have relevance in different sectors just like Q-scores, Neilsen ratings, Google Metrics, etc.

The problem with quantitative measures in any of these areas is they do not do sentiment analysis. Maybe 1 million people click on a link to an article on a news site. What does it matter if 900,000 people disagree with it, so long as the site gets the traffic? Ads are delivered, like and share buttons are clicked, the cycle continues.

It will take about 10 years for people to come to appreciate what's going on. By that point, social media / the web will be very different things.

The part that is skeevy is the "skinning" of real accounts to make fake ones.

 Easy E wrote:
The part that is skeevy is the "skinning" of real accounts to make fake ones.

Yeah, the appearance of authenticity is why they do it. You don't want someone looking at your friends list and seeing it's all a bunch of bots.