Trend hijacking is a technique used by a variety of Twitter accounts for a variety of purposes, and in this case the purpose appears to be to advertise dubious services that sell online reviews and social media accounts. #WednesdayWisdom
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@ZellaQuixote We decided to look closer at the networks that sell reviews and accounts. We searched for tweets containing "buy" or "for sale" and "reviews" or "accounts". After removing (a lot of) false positives, we ended up with 270 accounts, most of which are recent creations.
@ZellaQuixote The most prolific of these accounts link a variety of websites advertising a smorgasboard of products and services for sale, such as:
- Yelp, Google, Zillow, and TripAdvisor reviews both positive and negative
- Twitter, Instagram, Google, Facebook, and AOL (yes, AOL) accounts
- Yelp, Google, Zillow, and TripAdvisor reviews both positive and negative
- Twitter, Instagram, Google, Facebook, and AOL (yes, AOL) accounts
@ZellaQuixote We found 16 sites selling reviews and accounts, and 46 Twitter accounts promoting them within the last month. Some of the accounts link more than one of the sites (and the sites tend to be very similar), leading us to suspect much of this activity is a single operation.
@ZellaQuixote Additional evidence that the activity surrounding the account/review sales sites is coordinated: extremely repetitive tweets. (It's possible these accounts are bots but since they tweet mostly via the Twitter website and volume of any given account is moderate, we can't be sure.)
@ZellaQuixote In contrast, the 224 review/account sellers that don't link an affiliated website don't look like a single network, but there are nonetheless shared behaviors. Tagging bots that automatically retweet tweets in which they are tagged is one such behavior.
@ZellaQuixote We've seen the tag-for-retweet bots before, btw - they figured prominently in our recent #FishingForRobots experiment, described in this thread:
