Fake Twitter Accounts Big Business

Following Twitter’s successful initial public offering in November, it’s been revealed that some users are buying Twitter accounts with bots programmed to spam the microblogging platform.

Fake account owners like Jim Vidmar, who claims to manage 10,000 robots that boost the presence of about 50 paying clients, supply those results by bombarding Twitter, as he’s been doing for about six years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A rapper named Fyrare, whose real name is Dave Murrell, told the WSJ that although he sometimes buys Twitter ads, he gets better results from bogus tweets purchased from an outside party like Vidmar.

“If you’re not padding your numbers, you’re not doing it right,” Murrell was quoted as saying, “It’s part of the game.”

Vidmar said Facebook has suspended his account activity and threatened legal action for continuing said activities.

However, Twitter allegedly hasn’t contacted or given him the same warning beyond suspending or deleting several accounts he used for his business, the paper said.

The phony accounts have reportedly been used for political purposes, too.

“The fake accounts remain a cloud over Twitter Inc., in the wake of its successful initial public offering. Twitter is where many people get news,” Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, told the paper. “If what is trending on Twitter is being faked by robots, people need to know that. This will and should undermine trust.”

A Twitter spokesman told the WSJ that although the terms of service prohibit the mass creation and the buying and selling of accounts, it’s a problem the company continues to battle.

“We have a variety of automated and manual controls in place to detect, flag, and suspend accounts created solely for spam purposes,” the spokesman said.

Twitter users, unlike Facebook, aren’t limited to a single account or required to use their own name, which some analysts say makes Twitter a target.

The company boasts more than 230 million active users per month and sports a market capitalization just shy of $30 billion.