Re New York Times: The Follower Factory

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: José María Mateos <chema () rinzewind org>
Date: Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 11:41 AM
Subject: Re: [IP] New York Times: The Follower Factory
To: <dave () farber net>


On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 07:13:46AM -0500, Dave Farber wrote:
> > For IP if you wish:
> >
> > In this investigation, the New York Times uncovers a multi-layer network
> > of fake Twitter followers. Celebrities, entertainers, businesses, and
> > social media "experts", under pressure to deliver follower numbers, buy
> > followers by the hundred thousand at relatively modest prices. Many of
> > these are supplied by the Florida-based company Devumi, which itself
> > buys bots for resale, but many are also counterfeit copies of disused
> > accounts that use the real names, profile pictures, and hometown details
> > of real Twitter users, some of them minors.

Hi Dave:

(For IP, if you wish):

I was intrigued by that analysis and started looking if their graphs
could be easily replicated (I wanted to check those plots for a number
of accounts of interest to me, and see if I could find those abnormal
patterns too). In the end, a bunch of lines in Python / R made the
trick:

https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2018/replicating-the-new-york-times-bot-twitter-analysis-with-r-and-python.html

Here's the code, for anyone interested:

https://github.com/rinze/nygraph_twitter

Cheers,

JMM.



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