Twitter has High Volume of Fake Accounts; And Rising

Recently researchers at the UK has accidentally discovered a big network lying dormant in Twitter while they were investigating on how people use it. The research had found nearly 3,50,000 fake accounts digging deeper can even reveal a bigger network.

Some of the accounts have been used to fake follower numbers, send spam and boost interest in trending topics.

Twitter recently in the 3rd quarter of 2016 its active users could cross more than 317 million.

The so called bot accounts are run by someone remotely who automates the messages and activities they carry out. Few people pay to get bots to follow their account or to reduce gossip about a contentious topic.

The research which was conducted Mr. Echeverria's began to find how people use twitter with 1% of sample users.

If you found a botnet and would like to help their research you could post to them to their twitter account or to thisisabot.com.

The difference in the fake accounts was uncovered by these characteristics,

• tweets coming from places where nobody lives
• messages being posted only from Windows phones
• almost exclusively including quotes from Star Wars novels

Dr. Zhou & Mr. Echeverria recent work revealed a bigger network of bots that seemed to contain more than 5,00,000 accounts.

It was hard to know who was behind the collections of fake accounts, said Dr. Zhou, although there was evidence that a small percentage of the accounts had been sold or rented as they were now following Twitter users outside the main bot network.

A Twitter spokesman said the social network had a clear policy on automation that was "strictly enforced".

"While we have systems and tools to detect spam on Twitter, we also rely on our users to report spamming," he said.