The Follower Factory - Clickbait article by NY Times

The Free For All Lounge
#1

Actually, it’s not really a clickbait story, quite in-depth about the “bot” epidemic and numbers of fake followers of big popular accounts and people through various platforms, they mostly discuss Twitter and Facebook, but it’s an interesting read. You might enjoy it too.

Copy paste: nytimes dot com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html

Fun quote:

And another one that really hits all the right notes about the relationship with fake accounts and how removing them (cough instagram cough) is not a good thing for their continued success.

But man, those evil fake accounts :grin:

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#2

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Why

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#3

I thought you made these until I went to the article. lmao.

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#4
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#5

The problem I have with articles like these is now people who know nothing about Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. followers quality will go around self-diagnosing profiles as “botted” and “real” or whatever else. An example of this is those people who say “follow and unfollow doesn’t work” even though it’s pretty much the best way to grow on Instagram and Twitter.

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#6

Yep, educating the masses without actual education. Basically fearmongering.

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#7

I love how basically a complete non-tech person was able to market himself so well that he took a massive margin on reselling bots to other people.

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#8

Good read, thanks for the share :slight_smile: everyone wants to claim to be an expert at identifying fake/botted accounts haha.

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#9

Looks like more problems incoming, lawsuit / investigation in progress:

nytimes dot com/2018/01/27/technology/schneiderman-social-media-bots.html