Recently you may have noted from various posts that our Twitter account has come under attack from .. sources unknown. Yet.
Our regular Twitter following - usually around the 12,000 mark and rising, gained slowly over a long period of time - jumped up by 2500, and then another 2500. And they just kept coming.
These, of course, are 'Fake Followers'. So what's the point of them?
Usually, Fake Followers are purchased by individuals or corporations wishing to give credibility to a new account by appearing to be more popular than it actually is, or by causes or campaigns, again to lend credulity to their cause. Indeed, we ourselves have pointed out - with supporting data -
that UKIP themselves have purchased Fake Followers in the past.
It seems these Fake Followers are being used in a new way - to discredit the account of an opponent. Twitter don't like them, and often threaten - although rarely act - to suspend any account found guilty of what is, in effect, a serious breach of Twitter rules. Hence the attack on us.
Who has paid for this attack ?
We don't know. We're trying to track it. But ask yourself, who would want to close us down ? Who has the funding for this ? There is only one answer. A Political Party, or allies of such a Party. They know who they are. Without proof, we cannot name them - but we know who we're all thinking of, right ?
Thankfully, we're damn good at this Internet stuff, and we have uber-geeks to call on when needed ! We have killed off 150,000 Fake Followers in the last few days.
Let's just absorb that number, shall we ? 150,000. All paid for by someone, all lasting less than 24 hours. And all zapped permanently.
We've now set things up so that future Fake Followers will be blocked quickly, permanently. Eventually the 'Bot Farms' will run out of addresses to use, or perhaps our opponents will get tired of throwing away good money in a failed attempt to affect our operations.
 |
| Fakes gone. |
One might ask why Twitter allows this to happen? Simply, they don't. When you purchase Fake Followers, you are not asked your Twitter password, just the account name. Why ? Because checking the password requires the Fake Followers vendor to have access to the Twitter API - and Twitter won't allow this. Hence, sabotaging any account is easy, albeit costly.
We would ask Twitter to examine their processes and manually check any account that suddenly gains large chunks of Fake Followers, especially Followers from the countries known to be the sources of such activity. To be honest, Twitter Support has not been a great source of assistance in this matter.
In the meantime, of course, if we have accidentally blocked any genuine followers, please let us know on Facebook and we'll unblock you.
Our operations remain unaffected by this attack.
We are unbowed, unbloodied, undefeated.
#NoPasaran.
