Social Media Want You to Buy Followers

A New York Times story about a company, Devumi, that has sold more than 200 million fake followers to second-tier celebrities and "influencers," has made a big splash; New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has tweeted that his office has opened an investigation into Devumi's "impersonation and deception." But the firm is just a tiny outfit with an office above a Mexican restaurant in West Palm Beach, Florida. What really needs to be investigated is to what extent social networks' user bases are fake and what benefits the giant companies that own them -- Facebook, Google, Twitter -- draw from the widespread fakery.

While The New York Times did a stellar job investigating Devumi, the Florida firm doesn't appear to be a particularly sophisticated player in the large market for social media fraud. It acquired Twitter bots wholesale from shadowy operations like Peakerr, Cheap Panel and YTbot and then retailed them with a huge markup to people too lazy to source the bots on their own.

The market, meanwhile, is large, diverse and often bizarre. Marketplaces exist for Facebook likes and fake reviews (University of Iowa's Shehroze Farooqi and collaborators explored a big one, SEOClerks.com, in an April 2017 paper). People create internet-of-things botnets that use routers and smart TVs infected with malware to register and exploit fake social network accounts. Canadian cybersecurity researcher Masarah Paquet-Clouston and collaborators documented the activity of such a botnet, Linux/Moose, in a July 2017 paper. 

In April 2017, Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London described a network of more than 350,000 Twitter bots that only tweeted quotes from novels based on Star Wars movies. The bots kept a low profile and helped bloat follower counts for years. Even the singer Lady Gaga counted 14,315 of the Star Wars bots among her more than 70 million followers. How much of the rest of that huge audience is fake? It would take dozens of investigations like Echeverria and Zhou's, or The New York Times's, to find out.

The Devumi story focuses on Twitter, the easiest network to exploit because of its purposely lax identification policies. Twitter followers are the cheapest on the black market. Devumi -- which, according to The New York Times, charged $17 per 1,000 followers buy -- was more expensive than most of the competition.

YouTube subscribers command the highest prices because, thanks to the way YouTube shares ad revenue with content creators, they are potentially the most lucrative.

The most difficult part of launching a social media bot is registering a fake account. On some of the networks, a bot needs to cheat Captcha robot detection. Others require a working phone number, a feature bypassed through the use of voice over internet telephony. The registration barriers are never high enough that it would become prohibitively expensive for the bot farms to jump over them. Paquet-Clouston and collaborators pointed out that to register accounts on Instagram, the Linux/Moose botnet simply generated email addresses