Demand for higher follower counts has helped turn the trading of Twitter accounts into a multi-million dollar business. A new report from The New York Times details research by two Italian security researchers who spent several months looking into the big players that offer customers fake followers, estimating that Twitter now has as many as 20 million fake accounts. Sold in batches, companies are utiliziing custom-coded bots to create hundreds of thousands of new Twitter accounts, opening up an underground economy that could potentially generate more than $40 million for those that operate within it.
Twitter’s war on the multimillion-dollar fake follower business
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