Twitter does try to prevent bogus accounts by enforcing a strict follower-to-following ratio, and by putting a 1,000-person cap on the number of people that any one account can follow in a single day.īut a robust market for fake followers still exists.
Jason Ding, a research scientist at Barracuda Labs, told NBC News that the number of Twitter accounts that were fake was 'at least 10 percent, maybe more.' Twitter, according to The Wall Street Journal, claimed in its Securities and Exchange Commission report that only 5 percent of its accounts were fake.
Italian security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, in a report released earlier this year, claimed that they found 20 million fake accounts for sale.
