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The
photo-sharing site was riddled with fake accounts that liked,
followed and hashtagged out the wazoo. Then came the great Instagram
Rapture, Instagrams pledge last December to clean
out the fake accounts and do everything possible to keep
Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much
of the web. The Purge cost famous grammers thousands,
sometimes millions, of followers. Users bemoaned the dropping
follower account, the diminished likes and the sense of lessened
popularity.
Only it didnt work.
According
to the Wall Street Journal, a team of Italian security researchers
say up to 8 percent of Instagram accounts are still computer-generated.
The study looked at activity from 10.2 million Instagram accounts,
many of which followed high-profile grammers like Taylor Swift
(@taylorswift) and National Geographic magazine (@natgeo). These
were the accounts that supposedly lost millions of followers in
the Rapture apparently, not millions enough.
William Howard knows a lot about these computer-generated
accounts hes a spokesperson for Rantic, a company
that sells followers, likes, views and more on social networks
like Facebook, Twitter, even Google Plus.
And Instagram, of course.
[Why
did Instagram censor this photo of a fully clothed woman on her
period?]
Before the whole shenanigans that happened with the purge
and the rapture, whatever people called it, Instagram had no spam
filters, Howard says. It was a fresh site when they
were getting more users. Their spam filter was very basic. There
wasnt a lot of protection versus people who create bots
and stuff.
Companies like Rantic.com profit off these fake accounts
they own bots that generate thousands to millions of faux Instagrams
and then sell them to celebrities, corporations and anyone else
looking to grow an account quickly and expediently.
After the rapture, Instagram nixed the fake accounts and updated
its algorithm and then bots like Rantics had to get
smarter.
Smarter
fake accounts arent just photoless usernames that plague
the Instawebs with random likes and comments with links. Instead,
theyre fully-fleshed accounts with biographies and avatars
and posts and followers of their own. Many of them even comment
on other accounts.
The most important part, however, is that the accounts stay active.
The Italian research team estimated that 30 percent of the accounts
in its sample were inactive, meaning they didnt post at
all over the course of the month-long study.
According to Instagram, the goal of the purge in December was to ensure that these fake accounts were deactivated and then no longer counted as followers.
Rantic
gets its fake accounts from a bot built by Russian programmers
(Howard says its one of the best). Prior to
the Rapture, Howard says the Rantic bot was generating 30 million
fake accounts and after the purge, about 10 million of
those were deleted.
Selling followers is a multi-million dollars business,
Howard says. And a bot is worth gold.
Howard says most of Rantics clients spend somewhere around $9.50 for 500 new followers that are active and not easily spotted as fake. If its a celebrity, an athlete or someone else with a higher following demand, theyll probably buy more, both to protect their reputations as well as their endorsement deals. That means the bots have to be smarter than ever and companies like Rantic have to move quickly after the next Instagram purge to bounce back with better fake accounts.
So:
can we ever escape the bots? On some places, maybe the
business of buying Facebook likes, for example, is almost
over, according to Howard.
Instagram maintains it is committed to fighting spam aggressively
well into the future even as bots remain a fact of Internet
life.
So in the end, there will still be Instagram and there will probably still be bots, too. This is the great trial of the Internet age, and it always has been: it will always get harder and harder to tell what is real, and what is fake, and who is real, and who is fake. That isnt changing any time soon.
And ultimately, youre not going to be able to tell the difference and maybe Instagram wont, either.
Like
this? Try these:
Twitter has a huge problem and its all in your
head.
I created the Caitlyn Jenner bot @she_not_he. This is what
I learned.
Always click the first Google result? You might want to
stop doing that!!