My follower factory

2018-02-03 1 min read

    Last week, the New York Times ran an expose on the massive amount of follower fraud happening on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, when you can buy tens of thousands of followers for a few thousand dollars it’s not very likely that they’re going to be real. Anyone who has used Twitter for even a nominal amount of time would have quickly discovered that there’s a rampant amount of bots. Some leave cryptic comments, others like and retweet, while others follow; most do all of the above.

    One of the cool ways they explored these fake followers is by plotting the growth of followers over time. Each point is a follower with the x-axis showing what number follower they were and the y-axis indicating when they joined Twitter. The idea here being that if you see a stretch of new followers that all joined Twitter at roughly the same time they’re likely bots.

    This was a pretty cool way to look at it and one of my friends, Geoff, shared an open source script that would pull and plot the data. I ran it for my meager, but amazing, 680 Twitter followers and am happy to report that there’s no obvious fraud pattern.

    My follower factory