How Devumi uses its 3.5M+ automated Twitter accounts, sometimes based on stolen social identities, to sell followers and retweets to 200K+ customers
Everyone wants to be popular online. — Some even pay for it. — Inside social media's black market.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
This New York Times investigation exposed the machinery behind social media's black market: Devumi running 3.5M+ automated Twitter accounts — some built on stolen identities of real people — and selling followers and retweets to more than 200K customers, including celebrities and journalists. The exposé triggered immediate fallout: within days, New York AG Eric Schneiderman opened an investigation into Devumi, which ended a year later in a precedent-setting settlement declaring the sale of fake followers and use of stolen IDs illegal.
First-order effects
Devumi's 200K+ customer base — public figures whose purchased audiences were now documented — faced exposure, while the real people whose names and photos populated the bot accounts saw their identities used without consent.
Twitter was put on notice that its follower counts, a core currency of its platform, were being systematically counterfeited at scale.
Second-order effects
The same gray market was already spreading beyond Twitter: services like Fuelgram let people turn their own Instagram accounts into bots to game the algorithm through traded likes and comments (as BuzzFeed documented months later), showing demand outlasting any single platform's crackdown.
Platforms and advertisers gained a legal template — the New York AG's finding that selling fake engagement is illegal — that could be invoked against lookalike vendors across networks.
Third-order effects
If enforcement follows the Devumi precedent, purchased-audience economics become a liability rather than an asset, pressuring the influencer-marketing industry toward verifiable engagement metrics.
The stolen-identity element reframes fake followers as an identity-theft problem, not just a platform-integrity one, widening who has standing to sue or regulate.
The trend: Social media engagement is shifting from an unregulated vanity market toward one where selling synthetic followers carries legal consequences and platforms face pressure to authenticate their counts.
The tactics used by Devumi on our platform and others as described by today's NYT article violate our policies and are unnacceptable to us. We are working to stop them and any companies like them.
Impersonation and deception are illegal under New York law. We're opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen identities. http://twitter.com/...
As many as 48 million of Twitter's reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Fascinating story on why you should be skeptical of online follower and engagement totals, especially when people get tons of retweets 1 second after tweeting http://www.nytimes.com/...
One finding of our report on the black market in social media fraud: @Twitter does not proactively police or search for impersonation. Enforcement of their policy depends heavily on users' reporting. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Our office is opening an investigation into Devumi and its apparent sale of bots using stolen IDs — part of @AGSchneiderman's broader focus on the growing use of bots & online impersonation. http://twitter.com/...
Cannot recommend this NYT opus enough. One of the most thorough reporting efforts I've seen looking at the growth of an industry that profits from warping social media to create an internet that is fundamentally less real than anyone is willing to admit. http://www.nytimes.com/..…
Interesting article on celebrities and others who buy fake followers on Twitter to make themselves seem more popular than they are. Here's a list of journalists — and a magazine — that do it: http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/...
a seventeen-year-old girl's identity was ripped from her twitter account and pasted onto a bot that retweeted graphic pornography. then thousands of people paid for that account to follow them. here's a deep look at the seedy underbelly of social media. https://www.nytimes.com/..…
‘One former “American Idol” contestant, Clay Aiken, even paid Devumi to spread a grievance: his customer service complaint against Volvo. Devumi bots retweeted his complaint 5,000 times.’ https://www.nytimes.com/...
These infographics created for a (quite interesting) @nytimes exposé on fake social media followers are great, but the Times is in desperate need of an iPhone upgrade [ https://www.nytimes.com/... ] pic.twitter.com/chpCpnYyla
The New York Times is better at finding fake Twitter accounts than Twitter itself, and Twitter openly admits they don't care about them as long as they don't spam. This matters because these tactics enable a massive amount of political influence. https://www.nytimes.com/...
guy fired from company that sells fake Twitter accounts impersonating real accounts goes on to create new company impersonating his old company, also impersonates customers from old company. https://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/W5nsiIfxJS
Back in 2014 we had to take @Popehat private for the better part of a week, because some ass was trying to get us banned by buying fake followers. We were getting about a hundred followers an hour. http://twitter.com/...
In China, Twitter is banned. That doesn't stop the Communist Party's flagship News organization, @XHNews , from buying hundreds of thousands of fake twitter followers. We now have the proof thanks to @nickconfessore @gabrieldance @Rich_Harris http://www.nytimes.com/...
Twitter is an amazing product that I use and enjoy daily BUT... Twitter's originals sins are its inability to police bots/spam & passivity re abuse. http://twitter.com/...
I found this interesting. Makes sense that companies starting to value engagement more than an actual follower count when it comes to influencers http://twitter.com/...