If you’re on Twitter, and have any number of followers at all, you’re going to end up getting followed by some bots — usually spambots looking for people to pester when certain keywords get used.
But when Twitter accounts have more than a relatively small percentage of fake followers, it’s almost certainly because they went out and bought them in order to make themselves look more influential than they really are.
Well, it looks like two of the most active members of A Voice for Men’s Twitter squad have done just that.
Twitter users @BlutalTheDog and @UnseenPerfidy recently ran “Twitter Audits” of a couple of AVFMers who are especially active on Twitter — AVFM “Managing Editor” @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra, co-host of AVFM’s Blue Collar Red Pill online radio show. The results weren’t pretty:
That’s right: it looks like both of them bought the overwhelming majority of their “followers” — tens of thousands of them in total.
I checked both of their accounts using another fake-Twitter-follower finder on Statuspeople.com, and the results were similarly terrible:
That’s not just embarrassing; it’s sleazy, and a pretty big breach of journalistic ethics for someone (Esmay) who’s the managing editor of an online publication.
By contrast, here’s the Twitter Audit of someone who doesn’t buy Twitter followers.
It will be interesting to see Esmay and Barnes explain this, or if they even try.
UPDATE: Well, Barnes has responded by … blocking me on Twitter. (Esmay already had me blocked.)
Twitter user @AnimalJimmies, meanwhile, has pointed me to two more (apparent) fake-follower buyers, one a GamerGate celebrity, the other AVFM’s “Assistant Managing Editor.”
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we buy Twitter followers to decieve!
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that Mr. C is claiming that evil SJWs are buying fake followers for him in an attempt to make him look bad. Which is, I suppose, possible. But he also claims that he’s got 11,000 or so real followers regardless. Twitter Audit says his real followers only number about 4400.
This is interesting but is there any proof that these are bought followers, not just these two guys being really careless/not caring about blocking bots?
On the other hand, I’ve been on twitter since 2008 and I’ve had no trouble blocking the few bots that try to follow every few weeks or so. Maybe I just don’t use the right keywords to get more…
Think of the sparkly new tooth to replace the one feminism cheated you out of..
You should have spent this money on that Dean..
@Andrea
In the end, you can’t prove anything about it, but you can have a pretty good suspicion. It’s very rare to need to block tens of thousands of bot.
Oh like Dean Esmay cares about ethics in journalism.
…I mean yeah sure it’s totally not about harassing women amirite
botslads?@andrea:
There’s a huge difference between ~400 fake bots and ~13,000 for two accounts that have similar orders of magnitude of real followers, a magnitude of around 30. I’m not sure how reasonable it is to think that they were attracting bots 30 times as quickly.
@David:
You should totally link back to your other post where Paul Elam was accusing you of buying page hits. That’d be some great context.
Ah, but you do have 386 fake tweeterer followers! That totally proves that you buy traffic stats from Alexa!
Ninja’d by Kirbywarp! But probably only because I went to look for the page.
And it’s closer to 50,000 fake followers for the both of them.
AFVM is terrible, and buying fake followers is not entirely out of their league, but… I have to register at least one objection. I saw somebody run a similar audit on Mike Cernovich (the “lawyer of GamerGate”) and his results came up similarly, which got me thinking—I wonder how TwitterAudit sees the average GamerGate account? A lot of those accounts are fake (#notyourshield sock puppets, regular sock puppets, etc.) and would look that way to an auditing tool.
It’s still an embarrassment (either way, most of their followers are fake), but it might not be a case of people buying fake followers.
@Falconer:
I’m pretty sure doing extra leg-work gives you some sort of ninja protection. 😛
I’m not so sure about this. My recently deceased blog has about 2,400 ‘followers’, of whom 2,200 are totally fake. I just never knew how to block the crappy ones. At the rate the fakes are appearing, I’ll easily be up to 10,000 ‘followers’ by the end of the year. I’d hate to be called out over it.
Is it pirates? Because whittling is the only leg-work they seem to be interested in doing.
Well no real shock here.
Also I bear more good news.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/04/jury-to-yougotposted-nude-photo-revenge-website-owner-you-just-got-convicted-scumbag-video/
And at least one of Futrelle’s “fake” followers is actually a human: myself. I just happen to be interested in penis enlargement and making thousands of dollars a month working from home.
VERY interested.
Lol they’re not the only ones. 6/7 of Mike Cernovich’s 24K followers are fake as well. He was whining about it back in December, claiming it was some kind of SJW conspiracy to inflate his follower account, then get him kicked off Twitter. I wonder if he was just planting a cover story for when someone found out. A conspiracy to buy these people follows just sounds too stupid.
https://twitter.com/BeninCitizen/status/562778571673194500
Isn’t #gamergate already well known for creating hundreds of sock accounts for harassment purposes? I’m pretty sure they are the source of Mike’s fake followers.
Someone should run this test on St.Paul himself. Would be interesting to see how he holds up.
The right-wing projection rule had me wondering about this after the nonsense about page hits.
This is a new one on me. Right away I wanted to audit some other twitterers at AVFM, but the services both asked for the password to “my” twitter account. I can’t understand how one can audit somebody else’s twitter since one won’t know the PW…
@ Dan
Thanks for that (bit of a legal nerd).
In exchange please have this from our side of the pond.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-law-to-tackle-revenge-porn
The only thing about this that shocks me is that these guys have any real followers at all.
ANY.
For the curious.
Crap HTML Link didn’t work.
http://i.imgur.com/5qxXntS.png
OMG I’ve just found the most hilarious drivel over at Chateau Heartiste:
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/the-five-female-body-types-and-one-is-the-very-best/
The opening sentence is all you need to know about the tone of this piece.
REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES.
Says a man whose own (very mediocre) appearance also has real world consequences…of women holding up their hands in the universal gesture for “Stop right there!” when they see him coming.
@sunnysombrera:
Alright. Started skimming and found the opening graphic, which only has 4 shapes on it. Great start! Before I read the whole thing, I’m going to make a prediction and say that Heartiste will end up declaring the current cultural “ideal” (hourglass) as the the best one. Let’s see how I do!