A Beginner’s Guide to Spotting Fake Social Media Accounts
Honest Fakes
Beijing, sometime in 2014 — I can’t remember the month or the date, but it doesn’t matter. I do remember that it was a Wednesday morning in the office. We opened up Youku (a Chinese Youtube clone) and were delighted to see that our company’s promotional ‘viral’ video was indeed going viral. We had gained tens of thousands of views overnight! The money we’d paid to a digital marketing agency seemed well spent. Except something was a bit off: Why no comments, why just views? We sent our VP of marketing off to ask the agency what was going on.
Thursday morning. Behold! Our problem was solved. Now we had hundreds of comments and tens of thousands more views. Our video was top-ranked on one of Youku’s category pages. Except… why were all the comments so generic and short? They were all one-word phrases like, “Cool!” “Great!” “Good watch! (sorry for the Chinglish) “Interesting!” They could have been typed by anyone, on any video, and they would have been equally (ir)relevant. Further investigation in the analytics dashboard revealed that the views themselves were all coming in blocks of several thousand simultaneously, repeated every few hours.
Later that day, the marketing agency admitted quite freely that we were not paying for real people to watch and comment on the video. They…
