Reed Black reed at unsafeword.org
Wed Jul 22 16:11:29 PDT 2015


If you look at people who have a large number of followers which their
activity or identity wouldn't normally warrant, you will find that the
synthetic accounts who follow them exhibit a lot of random retweeting and
favoriting behavior. Many of the synthetic accounts also do double duty by
posting spam links should anyone visit them.

All speculation, but:

There are people who offer paid follower, favoriting, and retweeting
services. I suspect the operators include more bogus activity than paid
activity on the synthetic accounts. The additional activity would muddy any
third-party analysis. For example, it would make it harder for Twitter to
spot bogus accounts. It would also be harder to know who's really paying
for artificial activity versus who's been randomly selected (if Twitter
even cares about such things).

If the crap favoriting gets these accounts some non-synthetic followers or
visits, they also become useful vehicles for those spam links. It's
doubtful that Twitter worries as much about accounts that spam if people
visit the account after a favorite and see a spam link, rather than the
spammer revealing the spam to others with @mentions.


On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 6:10 PM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:

> joined the twitters recently,
>  noticed that many of my posts attract "favorite'ers"
>
>  who are honey pots. E.g.:
>  - https://twitter.com/AudreySykestfm
>  - https://twitter.com/EvelynHarri0pp
>  - https://twitter.com/PenelopeRosap8
>  - https://twitter.com/AdalynEsteskul
>  - https://twitter.com/PazhetnykhMiss
>  - https://twitter.com/helensmithusacc
>  - https://twitter.com/RubyFlemingdy5
>  - https://twitter.com/KaelynMorenm2g
>  - https://twitter.com/PeytonKanee97
>  - https://twitter.com/LilyArnoldvkm
>
>  maybe social research, or ... ?  i guess they think i've got a type :P
>
>
> best regards,
>   not interested codermange
>
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