Sarah Dobbs finds out what’s lurking behind those fake names and faces
It’s always exciting when a notification pops up to tell you you’ve got a new follower on Twitter (or Instagram, or Tumblr, or the other social media platform of your choice). Whether you’ve got 50 followers or 50,000, attracting more feels like an ego boost – it means someone’s interested in what you’ve got to say! However, when you see that it’s just a weird account with a fake name and a stolen photo as an avatar, rather than a real person, it’s not very exciting at all. What’s more, rather than making you look and feel more popular, these fake followers can actually be harmful to you and your credibility.
So where do they come from, what are they up to, and what should you do about them? Let’s see…
Who Makes Fake Accounts?
In a word: scammers. There are a few different flavours of fake followers, and they differ slightly from one platform to another, but 99 times out of a hundred, we’re just talking about spammers here. Generally, the accounts aren’t being handled by real people, or at least not one per account; they’re churned out by bot farms, and created in their hundreds. Usually, they’ll grab names and photos from other accounts, as well as stringing together nonsensical bios in the hope that you’ll think they’re a real person. These accounts may also repost or outright steal posts and try to pass them off as their own, all to try to trick people into mistaking them for actual humans.
Once the accounts are set up, they’ll start following people. They might be attracted by keywords (if you’ve ever tweeted about Apple products, you’ll probably know all too well how many spammers are out there waiting to pounce) or just following at random. By following people, the scammers hope you’ll follow their fake accounts back. And once you’re following them, the real scam will begin.
Again, there are different kinds of scams that use fake followers, and some are more harmful than others. Sometimes, they just want to spam out links in the hope of hooking an unsuspecting follower. Those links might lead to things they want to sell… or they might lead to sites hosting malware, or phishing scams. If you’ve followed a fake account back, they can also send you direct messages, and try to get you to fall into their traps that way. Basically, interacting with fake followers is a pretty dreadful idea, and not recommended.
Bought And Paid-for Fake Followers
There’s another kind of fake follower you’ll come across if you’re active on social media, too, and that’s the paid-for kind. Now, if you use the internet to keep in touch with friends and generally chat to people you like, the idea of buying fake followers might seem utterly incomprehensible. However, if you’re a small brand – a blogger, say, or an online shop – being able to buy a few thousand followers might sound like a good idea. Online credibility often comes down to how many followers you have, but building a large following can take time. Fake followers, on the other hand, can be bought pretty cheaply. Thus, almost overnight, anyone can make themselves look far more influential.
That’s actually the kind of service that a lot of the fake followers you’ll see appearing on your account are trying to sell you. Those kinds of spammers generally don’t even bother to create a fake identity, instead naming themselves like “ßuý Möre Föllowér§”so you know exactly what they’re selling as soon as the notification appears.
There’s an obvious drawback to buying followers, which is that they tend to be totally useless and obvious, and you won’t get the same kind of engagement you’d get if you actually had, you know, 10,000 extra real people following you. Nonetheless, the illusion of being super popular still appeals to some people. That’s a real problem for brands, because engagement is key – and fake followers are never going to actually buy anything from you. Worse, they could end up costing money, because platforms like Facebook charge brands money to increase their reach, to make sure their posts appear in their followers’ timelines. What’s the point in paying to advertise to people who don’t even exist?
How To Get Rid Of Fakers
In short, there’s absolutely no benefit to having fake followers beyond looking slightly more popular than you otherwise would. So, if you’re getting scammers following you, how do you get rid of them?
The easy answer is to delete them as soon as they pop up – preferably blocking and reporting them in the process, so that the accounts can be deleted by Facebook, or Twitter, or whoever. And the good news about these farmed fakes is that they’re generally pretty easy to spot: just like spam email, spam accounts will tend to use bad spelling and grammar, or just post word salad that obviously hasn’t come from a person you’d want to engage with. They’re probably using either a porn star as their avatar, or haven’t bothered to create one at all; on Twitter, that means they’ll be using the default egg image as their user pic. Their account may also be chock-full of obviously dodgy links. Be careful not to click on any of those links while you’re blocking them – just get rid of them!
If you’re being inundated with fakes, or you’re worried you might have a lot of fake followers scattered amongst your legitimate ones, there are apps available to help you weed them out, but they tend to charge, so beware of that.
Whack-a-mole
Ultimately, fake followers are just one more internet annoyance; another thing you’ll need to be careful of when you’re navigating the web. The good news is that, just as email providers developed increasingly effective ways of sieving out spam, social media companies are also working on ways of getting rid of fake accounts and making it harder for more to pop up. The bad news is, well, have you checked your spam folder recently? As long as people are willing to pay to buy fake followers, there’ll be someone willing to meet that demand. So if you take nothing else away from this article: please, never be tempted to pay money for fake followers. It’s really not worth it.