∑ XahLee
15% accounts on twitter are fake, sold by companies. And, apparently, many celebrities, politicians, actually buy them. Also, twitter of course knew, but don't really do anything about it.
here's New York Times articles.
〔 The Folowwer Factory 2018-01-27 By Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X Dance, Richard Harris And Mark Hansen. At https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html 〕
(New York Times is often sjw fake news. This seems a good one.)
∑ XahLee
the follower usually cost 1 cent each. e.g. 1k followers cost you $10.
apparently, many normal, legitimate people, (actors, tv star, olympic athletes, businessmen, politicians, and porn stars), who may already have 1 hundred thousand followers, still, actually buy followers themselfs.
number of followers is the number 1 thing we naively judge legitimacy.
∑ XahLee
it's so severe that those public figure people actually depends on number of followers for their career. e.g. spend few hundred bucks to buy followers to save the tens of thousands bucks you make.
one of there techniques in creating fake account is that they go thru twitter, suck up profile photos, and color shift the photo a bit (to avoid detection), and use that as the fake account's photo, sometimes becomes multiple fake accounts.
∑ XahLee
CNN's Hilary Rosen @hilaryr is the one who bought the MOST (500k) twitter followers few years ago, by a in depth digging of @nytimes article title The Follower Factory. She currently has 289k follower.
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