The bid came on Twitter from a self-proclaimed expert in social media. His account had just 15 followers, so the expert bit seemed implausible.
“I will give you another 5,000 twitter followers,” his tweet stated. It was going to cost a mere $5.
“It’s my lucky day”, I thought, as I clicked on the link to his website, which offered packages with four orders in the queue. His website was crammed with praise and good reviews from previous so-called follower buyers. A quick internet search brought up many more saying: “Buy Twitter followers—1,000 quality followers for only $14—save now. One hundred percent money back guarantee!”
Always being one for a good deal, I happened to spot 22,000 Twitter followers for only $20. A few clicks later, I’d  have my own Twitter empire and fame, beyond my wildest dreams.
It’s the new big deal in social media—the purchasing of Facebook friends, likes and Twitter followers. It creates illusions of influence and grandeur overnight yet with little substance.
The other week I received an e-mail from a young businessman claiming 25,000 followers on Twitter. I fed the account details through a website called StatusPeople.com, an application that analyses accounts for their follower validity. There we had it! The tool identified the Twitter feed as having an almost 80% fake follower rating—these are ghost Twitter accounts set up by someone with merely a name and at best a photo. These accounts are inactive in terms of tweeting and are designed to be fillers. They are registered in bulk to sell to someone looking for large numbers of followers overnight.
I ran a few prominent Twitter accounts through the Status People application to get an indication of how many fake accounts exist in the Twittersphere. Surprisingly, a lot. First up was Pastor Chris Oyakhilome from Nigeria, better known as ‘Pastor Chris’ or ‘Christ Embassy’ to his followers both in real-life and on Twitter. With more than one million followers, the Status People application indicates that 47% of his followers are inactive and 18% are fake, which means that the remaining 35% are legitimate and active Twitter followers. Would this be a case of ‘many are tweeted, yet few are active?’
In South Africa, I analyzed some of the bigger twitter accounts. South African cricketer Graeme Smith has a 230,000 Twitter following, of which 53% are inactive and 27% are fake, which doesn’t leave many to influence or tweet after the match.
Then there is @GarethCliff, the South African Idols judge and breakfast radio host, with a 340,000 Twitter following. He has a 44% inactive following and a further 17% are listed as fake, according to the application. By no means do I believe that any of the above mentioned accounts bought followers, especially Cliff—who has an army of fans the length and breadth of the land, however public personalities have been known to leverage their Twitter accounts for promotional purposes as an added-value service, imaginably, leaving their clients expecting.
South Africa’s Woolworths retailer was not spared when @JustinHarrison—sporting more than 680,00 followers, of which 78% are considered fake by the Status People application—unleashed a public relations nightmare on the retail giant after claiming so-called racially discriminatory employment practices, which were ceremonially dismissed by the retail giant. Nevertheless, this led to a mainstream media and Twitter onslaught which lasted for weeks and resulted in Woolworths disabling their Facebook wall due to the public outcry on their social media platforms.
Remarkably, even with the high amount of ghost Twitter followers involved, this matter managed to gain remarkable media exposure and in monetary terms what can cost one man, may mean earnings for another.
Ad Dynamo, a contextual advertising company which focuses on mobile and online platforms, introduced a new marketing service called  ‘sponsored tweets’. According to the company, Twitter users who have signed up to Ad Dynamo’s sponsored tweets service become paid publishers by responding to briefs prepared by advertisers.
“The advertiser can review the tweeter in advance of authorizing and paying for their tweet—looking at the user’s recent tweets, profile, and so on.  Each tweet purchased by the advertiser is overlaid against the advertiser’s Twitter account, enabling them to review the increase in followers, retweets and mentions against each individual tweet purchased. This enables them to measure the effectiveness of each tweet purchased and of each Twitter user that submits a draft to the advertiser,” says Ad Dynamo spokesperson, Richard Bell.
For the unseasoned marketer, this could prove to be dangerous ground initially, as those with massive followings on Twitter could charge a premium, for brands to get exposure to thousands of followers, only to find that these are ghost accounts. Ad Dynamo assures me that they have integrated post-campaign analysis to monitor the success of individually paid tweets, however, this is very much after the fact as opposed to a pre-screening.
So what value do advertisers receive if the perceived amount of targeted followers is actually an inaccurate number? Very little one would imagine.
As exciting as these thousands of newly-bought followers might be for anyone’s ego, it’s a bit like hosting a dinner party for blow up dolls, and for advertisers it would be much the same experience. Tweets are being read by fewer people than expected and will receive virtually little engagement or response. So, what is the point of all of this?
This will be one of the bigger stepping stones in the development of social media, much like when the first cellphone and modem came along—we didn’t really know what to do with it or how to use it effectively. The accurate measurement, use and credibility of social media will be the next big breakthrough, apart from figuring out how to develop a sustainable business model around these platforms, and maybe make some legitimate friends.

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At the beginning of last month, social networking giant Facebook filed for a $5 billion initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). Facebook is earmarked to raise about $10 billion from the offering, making it the biggest technology IPO ever. In 2004, Google managed to raise $1.9 billion and was valued at $23 billion. Only three companies have breached the $10 billion barrier: Visa Inc, General Motors and AT&amp;T Wireless.
Facebook is being valued between $75 billion and $100 billion, and if all goes to plan, the stock is expected to commence trading in May. The offering will make many of the internet company’s 3,000 employees Silicon Valley’s newest millionaires.
Chief executive officer and founder Mark Zuckerberg, aged just 27, owns 28% of the company. This IPO will propel him into the multi-billionaire league, making him the fourth-wealthiest man in the United States—remarkable for a guy who started the company in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004. Despite going public, Zuckerberg will retain effective control of Facebook through his holding of 57% of voting shares.
Investment banks will also be laughing all the way to the bank. They stand to make $100 million in fees, which will be a welcome boost for revenues, given the currently tough trading conditions being experienced by banks around the world. Morgan Stanley, the number one underwriter of US IPOs for three consecutive years, will lead the offering and will share the spoils with Wall Street’s usual suspects: Goldman Sachs; JP Morgan; Bank of America; Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital.
Facebook boasts more than 845 million active subscribers, with over 10% of the global population using the platform to chat, play games and swap 250 million pictures daily. In 2011, the company reported revenues of $3.7 billion, 85% of which was generated from advertising. In the same year, the company reported profits of $1 billion. In a letter that accompanied the filing to the SEC, Zuckerberg said: “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.”
The Arab Spring, which started in 2011, is testament to the transformation Zuckerberg talks about. Protests were co-ordinated through Facebook and social networking sites.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, many African leaders and governments are only too well aware of the power that the electorate wields through social media. In fact, China blocked Facebook in 2009 following riots in Xinjiang which the authorities attributed to Facebook.
African governments will be wary of social unrest following the Arab Spring and their broken promises to their electorates. However, African governments are unlikely to go the China route and block Facebook and other social networking sites.
South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, recently opened a Facebook page to allow voters to communicate with him directly to voice service delivery concerns, which were taken into account during the state of the nation address last month. This was a welcome development and hopefully, many more African leaders will follow suit.

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One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across a black background.
“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully and spread the following message,” it read. “Your Internet activity is monitored.”
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Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round, mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: “This is Telecomix. We come in peace.”
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised vulnerable Cisco Systemsproduced network switches to find other devices’ passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even officials’ desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for 5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the above-mentioned surveillance warning into browsers across the country.
As the globally distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
“At first we were just poking around, but when I saw that, I had this feeling of dread,” says Punkbob, who requested that FORBES not use his real name. “To see exactly what Syria was tracking and who was providing the technology to do it.…That was when it felt real.”
Since Telecomix published 54 gigabytes of those logs, the resulting attention has forced Blue Coat to admit that its gear had been used by Syria, a potential violation of international sanctions against that country. The company didn’t respond to FORBES’ request for an interview, citing an ongoing internal review and a related Commerce Department probe. (Note that the investigation didn’t deter private equity firm Thoma Bravo and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan from a recent deal to take Blue Coat private for $1.3 billion.)
The disclosure of Blue Coat’s gear in Syria has touched off revelations that hardware from other U.S. firms, including NetApp and HP, was also used by blacklisted regimes. The industry now faces tough new questions about tech firms’ responsibility for how their products are used—and by whom.
Telecomix sees its Blue Coat discovery as a turning point in the group’s mission: Founded to fight for free speech, it now aims to also expose those who fight against that ideal, including any Western tech firm aiding the wrong side. “I hope that the Blue Coat thing was the start of something much bigger,” says Chris Kullenberg, a lean and lip-pierced Swedish political science grad student at the University of Gothenburg and a Telecomix founder. “The goal is to put political pressure on these companies. It started with rage and frustration. What can we do? Well, we can hack a few boxes and expose this to the world. That’s the motivation that drives hackers deeper and deeper into the networks.”
Telecomix likely broke Syrian law. But some more traditional advocates appreciate their work. “It crosses a line we wouldn’t be comfortable crossing,” says Brett Solomon, president of the digital human rights group Access Now.
“But sometimes it takes someone like Telecomix to put a spanner in the works.”
Actively hacking networks is a new game for Telecomix’s Web revolutionaries, who call each other “agents” or “Internauts.” But unlike the hacker group Anonymous, which began with juvenile pranks before attacking Scientologists, opponents of WikiLeaks and defense contractors, Telecomix was born political. The group was created at a Gothenburg conference in 2009 to oppose the European Union’s so-called Telecoms Package, industry-influenced laws that would have cut Internet access for anyone repeatedly downloading copyrighted files. “In a sense, corporations have always been the enemy,” says Kullenberg.
The hackers dug up and published the phone numbers of every EU Parliament member, then convinced the copyright-flouting Swedish download site the Pirate Bay to post a link on its home page, which received 20 million monthly visitors. The Parliament’s phones were jammed for days, and the statute was eventually dropped.
The populist uprisings of the Arab Spring brought Telecomix’s goals—and its enemies—into sharper focus. A few days into the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt Hosni Mubarak shut down all but one of his country’s Internet service providers. “Telecomix members consider themselves citizens of the Internet,” says one American Telecomix hacker who goes by the nickname the Doctor. “So we took that as a personal affront.” Agents arranged with the hacker-friendly Internet provider French Data Network to fire up modem banks and give users free dial-up connections. Then the group faxed thousands of leaflets to Egyptian universities, offices and cybercafes, explaining how to skirt the blackout.
Telecomix’s scanning of the Syrian Net began as reconnaissance to prepare for an Egypt-style Internet shutdown. Stumbling onto the Blue Coat logs was a fateful fluke. When the hackers realized what they’d found, they downloaded close to 100 gigabytes of data, using the Tor anonymization network to cover their tracks. The process took weeks. In October Telecomix released hundreds of millions of lines of text listing hundreds of sites the Syrian government was blocking, from porn to Facebook to Chat- roulette, along with enough users’ communication logs to show that the regime was using their Blue Coat gear to not only filter but also monitor dissidents’ activities.
Blue Coat’s scandal demonstrates the complexity of regulating surveillance technology. The firm claims it hadn’t known about its devices in Syria, arguing they must have found their way into the country through a reseller in the United Arab Emirates. “Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a repressive regime,” it wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States.” But critics like cryptography guru Bruce Schneier and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum point out that Blue Coat devices link back to its servers for licensing and updates, implying the company may have turned a blind eye to its Syrian users.
Some Telecomix agents say they’ve also spotted equipment sold by Fortinet in Syria. Fortinet responds that it “has in place a policy prohibiting shipping its product to countries where shipment is embargoed.” And what about resellers who pass it on to those countries? “At that point it’s out of our hands,” a spokesperson says. Hazy as the line may be, it’s clear some companies have crossed it. Marketing documents published by Wiki Leaks show 160 firms advertising surveillance gear, often in Arabic as well as English. British firm Gamma International brags that it can spy on users of Gmail, Skype and iTunes; its sales pitch was found in the files of the Egyptian government after Mubarak fled.
Telecomix is determined to remain a watchdog against Western firms aiding foreign Big Brothers. Two Swedish members, Chris Kullenberg and Jonatan Walck, have registered a site called Internaut.cat where they plan to publish future disclosures of the group’s findings, using Sweden’s strong media laws to shield their sources. “We’re at a point now where Internet users are becoming aware of what’s being done to them,” says the Doctor. “Companies that sell gear designed to track people should expect to be outed.”

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SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have long imagined a future in which facial recognition technology makes anonymity in public obsolete.  A research study at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that this Minority Report future has already arrived, thanks to facial recognition products now commercially available, combined with the 750-million-person identity database called Facebook.
<div id="attachment_86" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86" class="size-large wp-image-86" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO091211_066-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="267" />Carnegie Mellon prof Alessandro Acquisti—the real guy, with his biometric face print—worries technology may expose everyone to constant scrutiny</div>
A CMU research team led by associate professor Alessandro Acquisti took candid photos of 93 random students on campus using a $35 webcam. Within seconds the researchers were able to determine the identities of a third of their photogenic guinea pigs, using of fthe- shelf facial recognition software from PittPatt, a software company recently acquired by Google, and publicly available profile photos from Facebook. The researchers had an even higher rate of success using the same technology to identify more than 100,000 Pittsburgh singles with otherwise pseudonymous accounts on a dating site, adding yet more complexity to the world of online dating. “We’ve been thinking about privacy in cyberspace, but we need to start thinking about it in the real world, with augmented reality,” says Acquisti. He was also able to determine the first five digits of some of the identified students’ Social Security numbers based on previous research he has done showing that those numbers are predictable if you know a person’s birth date and birthplace. That information is usually available on a person’s Face- book profile page.
It seems that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong. Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t being orchestrated by the governmental- Big Brother of 1984 but by advances in technology designed for convenience’s sake adopted eagerly by private citizens. Acquisti calls it the “democratization of surveillance”. And it’s coming fast. Soon after the riots broke out in London at the beginning of August, a technophile band of vigilantes formed a Google Group to discuss applying the methods pioneered by Acquisti’s research team to online photos and videos of rioters, in order to help identify looters for prosecution by law enforcement. Facial recognition tools identify a person by analyzing dozens of features, such as the length of a forehead and the distance between the eyes and the nose. Google, Facebook and Apple have already made them freely available for people to tag their friends and family in photo albums. But at what point will you have the option to snap a photo of a stranger and then pull up his or her name and whatever information the Internet offers up about them? The capability is there, but the willingness to unleash it isn’t. Yet. Google has said that its image search tool, Goggles—which uses a photo instead of text as a search term, letting you snap a photo of a painting, for example, and find out who its creator is—has the capability to find people’s identities based on a photo. But the search giant had chosen not to enable the feature because it was deemed too creepy.
When Facebook recently rolled out an internal facial recognition tool allowing friends to automatically tag other friends in photos, it inflamed some privacy advocates (whose combustion levels tend to be high around anything new that Facebook does). Those advocates seemed to overlook the fact that the very existence of Facebook’s extensive database of photos linked to people’s names creates the possibility for third parties to build a facial biometric print. While Facebook’s terms of service prohibit the scraping of information from its site, there are no technological tools in place to prevent it. And, even if there were, scraping is certainly not limited to Facebook.
“For most of us there are already identified photos of us somewhere on the Internet, and this trend will only increase,” says Acquisti. (Face.com did the doctoring on the photo on page 58.) The CMU researchers wrote a facial recognition iPhone app but decided not to release it to the public. “We developed the app to make a point,” says Acquisti. “A future in which we infer sensitive information from faces is already here, and we better start thinking whether we really want to live in that future.” Their tool, though, would be valuable only for those seeking to identify the 25,000 CMU students whose photos the researchers grabbed from Facebook. We’re still a few years away from an app that would work on a national or global scale. The two main hurdles, Acquisti says, are finding a large and reliable source of facial images (hello, DMV!) and securing enough computing power. Comparing a photo to a database of, say, 300 million photos would take many hours, whereas a functional app would need to do it in ten seconds. “If I had to guess, I would say that we are less than five years away,” says Acquisti.
Specialized facial recognition products are already on the market. BI2 Technologies has developed a $3,000 iPhone add-on called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System) that dozens of police departments across the country started adopting this year. Police officers can use MORIS to take photos of suspects, and the app, using iris scans and facial recognition, will identify anyone who already has a photo in a criminal database. Microsoft and Intel have worked together to create digital billboards with face-detecting cameras that pick up on the gender and age of passersby to show them relevant ads. A startup named SceneTap installed similar cameras in bars in Chicago earlier this year, so that Windy City nightlife lovers can use their smartphones to check the crowdedness, gender ratio and average age of patrons at a given bar before deciding where to go. So far law enforcement officials are tentative about using the technology to identify people not already in criminal databases.
Though a Canadian insurance corporation graciously volunteered the use of its driver’s license photo database to Vancouver police after the devastating post-Stanley Cup hockey riot there in July, authorities declined the offer after privacy advocates expressed concerns about violation of Canadians’ civil liberties. In London, Scotland Yard is using facial recognition tools along with tips from the community to identify rioters. As good as the technology has become, it still has accuracy problems that can cause significant harm. A Massachusetts driver sued his state DMV after his license was wrongfully revoked because he looked too much like another driver, leading to ten days of administrative wrangling to get it reinstated. “We are not the beautiful and unique snowflakes we think we are.
There are many people who look likeus,” says Acquisti. More than 30 state DMVs already apply facial recognition algorithms to driver’s license photos to prevent identity fraud. If you’re worried about your privacy, now might be a good time to change your Facebook profile photo to one in which you’re wearing ridiculously oversize sunglasses.
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