[LINK] A bizarre twist on a twist - unreal online persona

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

BRD writes,

> Rule #1 for any information system (and that includes the human mind)
> is: Never assume that data in a system reflects reality.  Given that
> rule, then a statement like "a real online persona" is meaningless ..


<http://mashable.com/2013/04/18/become-internet-famous/> (snip)

Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of.

There’s just one thing about Santiago Swallow that you won’t easily find 
online: I made him up .. He really does have a Twitter feed with tens of 
thousands of followers, he really does have a Wikipedia biography, and he 
really does have an official website. But (he does not exist in reality).

Creating Santiago and the online proof of his existence took two hours on 
the afternoon of April 14 and cost $68.

He was conjured out of keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I generated his 
name on “Scrivener,” a word processor for writers and authors. I turned the 
“obscurity level” of its name generator up to high, checked the box for 
“attempt alliteration,” and asked for 500 male names. My choices included 
Alonzo Arbuckle, Leon Ling, Phil Portlock and Judson Jackman, but “Santiago 
Swallow” just leapt out as perfect. I gave Santiago a Gmail account, which 
was enough to get him a Twitter account.

Then I went to the website fiverr.com, the online equivalent of a dollar 
store, and searched for people selling Twitter followers. I bought Santiago 
90,000 followers for $50, all of whom would, he was assured, appear on his 
Twitter profile within 48 hours. Next I gave him a face by mashing up three 
portraits from Google images using a free trial copy of Adobe’s “Lightroom” 
image manipulation software.

I gave Santiago his “Twitter verified account” check box by putting it onto 
his cover image right where his name would appear. It will not fool many 
people, but might give him a little extra credibility with some. By the 
time I uploaded these images to Twitter, Santiago had developed a large 
“following,” even though he did not have a profile and had never tweeted 
anything.

To get him tweeting, I used a trial copy of TweetAdder, which automatically 
tweets, follows and retweets on Santiago’s behalf. His breezy platitudes 
come from half a dozen “mad-lib”-like phrases of the “if this, then that” 
variety, coupled with a list of nouns from the new age TED/SXSW hipster 
vocabulary: dolphins, phablets, Steve Jobs, mobile, Tom’s shoes, stevia and 
so on.

To get his Tweet count up as fast as possible, I set TweetAdder to spit out 
these jewels every minute or two and hooked him up to retweet select other 
Twitter users, mainly from the “religion and faith” category—plus, of 
course, Quartz.

Last, I wrote Santiago’s Wikipedia biography—trying for something that 
would not attract the immediate attention of Wikipedians on the lookout for 
scams and self-promotion. I borrowed the biography of management thinker 
Peter Drucker, deleted most of it and rewrote the rest, making Santiago an 
expert in the fake TED-ish field of “the imagined self.” His website cost 
$18 from WordPress.

Making up—or at least “enhancing”—an identity like this is something real 
people do to increase their reputation, look popular, and sell themselves. 
There are equally real people who profit from this by selling fake 
followers created by software at the push of a button.

Twitter is awash with fakers with fake friends, many with self-created 
Wikipedia biographies and most of whom position themselves as “professional 
speakers,” “experts,” or something similar. The people in the middle—the 
rest of us—get duped into thinking someone is more popular than they are.

On social media, it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility, and that 
is exactly what the fakers are hoping for. To most people, a Twitter 
account with tens of thousands of followers is an easy-to-read indication 
of personal success and good reputation, a little like hundreds of good 
reviews on Yelp or a long line outside a restaurant. Looking online to 
learn more about somebody has become a reflex—blind daters do it, potential 
employers do it, potential customers do it.

Specialist social media analytics companies do it too. These businesses 
claim they can analyze somebody’s social media behavior and accurately 
evaluate their level of influence. One of the best known is “Kred,” a 
service provided by San Francisco company PeopleBrowsr. PeopleBrowsr says 
its customers include consumer goods giants Procter & Gamble and Budweiser 
and major advertising agencies Ogilvy & Mather and Wieden + Kennedy.

Less than a day after he was invented, Santiago Swallow had a Kred 
influence score of 754 out of 1000. According to a free white paper Kred 
sent him, Santiago is living in a “new era of consumer influence: when 
nobodies become somebodies.”

If companies like PeopleBrowsr are so easily fooled, it is easy to see how 
other people might be taken in too. How can thousands of Twitter followers 
be wrong?

Consider Sandra Navidi. According to Wikipedia, Navidi is a “frequent media 
contributor,” who has “a global network with access to key decision-
makers,” “frequently appears as a keynote speaker and panelist all over the 
world,” and “provides financial markets analysis that has resonated in the 
financial community.”

On Twitter, Navidi has an impressive 5,000 or so followers. Which key 
decision-makers in the financial community follow Sandra Navidi’s resonant 
analysis? Mitch Tan, a “girl with simple dreams,” who only ever retweets 
and from three accounts; Kathleen Culver, who has 13 tweets to her name; 
and Vanessa from “Midwest, USA” who has tweeted 17 times, but only says 
things like “2eme jour sur twiiter =D.”

According to Status People, a website that analyzes Twitter users, 96% of 
Ms. Navidi’s followers are fake, and another 3% are inactive. Only 1%, or 
50, of her followers are really following her.

Scott Steinberg, rather like Santiago Swallow, is a “keynote speaker and 
bestselling futurist,” and also a “business management, technology and 
digital lifestyle expert.” He has more than 27,000 Twitter followers, 
including “Buy TW Followers,” “the world’s No. 1 Twitter followers seller,” 
and Meg McEachin, a young woman with two followers and no tweets 
whatsoever.

As a digital expert, Steinberg may be surprised to learn that, according to 
Status People, 75% of his followers are fake and another 4% are inactive. 
Or maybe not: we can assume he knows his “bestselling” books, are not 
actually bestsellers — his “Modern Parent’s Guide To Kids And Video Games” 
ranks two millionth on Amazon’s sales list and his “Business Expert’s 
Guidebook” is three millionth. They are both published by “Tech Savvy 
Global”—whose CEO is Scott Steinberg.

Twitter faking is not only for would-be experts and speakers. Last year, 
the technology blog Kernel caught a CEO named Azeem Azhar purchasing 20,000 
fake followers for his Twitter account. This was potentially awkward for 
Azhar, as his company, Peer Index, is —like his competitor Kred—in the 
business of measuring online influence and reputation. (Azhar told Kernel 
he did it to show how easily it could be done, and that such tactics didn’t 
affect Peer Index rankings.)

A few months later, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney received 
national attention for gaining 117,000 new Twitter followers in a single 
day. More recently, Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, who Foreign 
Policy dubs one the “10 Most Influential Latin American Intellectuals” and 
Time says is “One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World,” has 
also fallen under fake follower suspicion. Sanchez’s Twitter account has 
475,000 followers, but according to Status People, 19% are fake and 41% are 
inactive.

Although this still leaves her with real 230,000 followers, it also makes 
her vulnerable to doubters: in February, Mexican independent newspaper La 
Jornada used a detailed analysis of Sanchez’s Twitter account to raise the 
question “¿Quién está detrás de Yoani Sánchez?”—Who is behind Yoani 
Sanchez?

This is another way Twitter fakers do real harm. Just because you have fake 
Twitter followers, it does not mean you paid for them. Lady Gaga, Justin 
Bieber and Barack Obama have all made headlines for having fake Twitter 
followers—many millions of them. On average, only 28% of people following 
the 20 most popular Twitter accounts are real. The remaining users are 
either fake or dormant. According to Status People’s estimates, Justin 
Bieber has 15 million true followers, not the 38 million his Twitter 
profile shows, and Rihanna, not Lady Gaga, has the second highest number of 
users at 9.6 million, followed by Instagram—No. 12 in the official Twitter 
statistics—with 9.5 million.

People with large real Twitter followings, from celebrities to activists 
like Yoani Sanchez, are made to look guilty when they are in fact innocent. 
Fake followers created for sale to impostors like Santiago Swallow follow 
real users in an attempt to outwit Twitter’s generally very effective spam 
management systems. The more followers you have, the more likely it is that 
a fake follower will follow you. By trying to inflate themselves with the 
electronic equivalent of silicon implants, fakers make the system noisy for 
everyone.

But it seems to work: a few hours after Santiago was invented, Scott 
Steinberg proudly tweeted that he was “Thrilled to be giving keynote speech 
at Arizona Board of Nursing’s 2014 CNA Educators Retreat.” I know because 
Santiago Swallow retweeted it. 


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