I’m doing some casual research for a conference panel I’m moderating at the beginning of September in Hong Kong (more on that later). The topic is social media and intellectual property, but of course it’s almost impossible to completely ignore related issues like privacy, fraud and other commercial matters.

As I read up on these tangential subjects, I am consistently astounded at the inventiveness and chutzpah of the China fraudster. Successful new Net platforms may be difficult to create, but once they are out there, it sure seems easy for folks to come up with innovative ways to screw each other over. Yes, I know this sort of thing happens all over the world, but the audacity of the fraudsters here is breathtaking and always worth a comment or two.

The most recent source of entertainment I came across was last week’s China Daily article on microblogging and follower fraud. If the word “microblog” does nothing for you, think Twitter (single-purpose microblogging), as well as sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that have status update features, and all their cousins around the world (note that Twitter itself is blocked in China). Although there have been some serious (regulatory) problems with microblogging in China recently, the trend has been positive:

Microblogs have gained in status in China as the trendiest social networking system during the past 12 months, with more than 20 million users opening their microblogs on sina.com, China’s leading website.

Not bad. Of course, everything China does comes with gaudy, fantastically high numbers, so that’s to be expected to some extent. So yeah, microblogging is catching on, and as long as the government tolerates certain incarnations of it, the future looks pretty good.

With anything successful over here, two things will happen. First, imitation. There are already quite a few platforms out there, some of which have made the regulatory authorities nervous and prompted some rule changes. Second, commercialization. Anytime you get huge amounts of traffic and information exchange, someone’s gonna try and make a buck.

In microblogging, the currency is followers, or the folks who have “subscribed” to your feed. The more followers you have, the more people are paying attention to what you have to say. This is all sort of bullshit, of course. Some of my Twitter followers, for example, are following 1,000 other feeds and cannot possibly be reading anything I put out. Just not enough hours in the day.

Anyway, the number of followers is an easy metric, and marketing/PR folks, and their advertiser overlords, love an easy metric. So what happens next? (Those of you in the biz, be quiet. Don’t spoil the surprise for the rest of us.)

Any microblog that has at least 10,000 followers is qualified to post ads and thus reap profits, according to a recent report by the Economic Observer. But the occurrence of “zombie followers” on blogs to gain the impression of popularity may not be a secret in China but uncovering a large number of them in a short period is.

Ah yes, zombies, also known as fake followers; if you are selling ads, this is also known as fraud. The next question is, once everyone knows that these numbers are bullshit (and everyone knew that a long time ago), what’s the response?

Obviously, if I’m an advertiser, this does not amuse me, and I might cut back on my spending in this area. If I’m the platform operator (e.g. Sina), I stand to lose some bucks, so I’m going to scramble around for a tech solution.

Sina did that recently by comparing IP addresses and kicking out those with multiple accounts.¹ For example, if I have 100 followers, but those followers only have 50 IP addresses between them, well, there’s a good chance there are some zombies in that pack. Sina checked and ended up cutting quite a few zombies out of the follower herd, drastically reducing the numbers of users who had been putting up gaudy figures. How embarrassing.

Perhaps the most fun part of that China Daily article, though, is the description of the zombie follower service providers out there. Quite a little business they have going on, and they seem to be damn proud of it. I’ll leave you with an extended excerpt of how the zombie machine works:

“When you have more than 1,000 fans, you are a notice board. When you get more than 100,000 fans, you are a metropolitan newspaper. And with 10,000,000 fans, you can compete with China Central Television!” reads an advertisement used by shops [on Taobao, an online commerce site] trading in microblog followers.

But as supervision has stepped up on zombie followers, the trade has not surprisingly found a way around the major obstacle.

Nearly every online shop has claimed that they sell “high-quality eternal” microblog followers who have their own individual photos, their own followers and microblogs. Even their microblog messages are updated from time to time.

“They are nothing like zombie followers. There’s no way they can be uncovered. We will give you a new one if any of them got deleted,” said a shop owner nicknamed Mao Mao.

Unlike Mao Mao who only sells microblog followers, many online shop owners have expanded their services to a new territory. “Twenty-eight yuan can buy you 50 comments for your own microblog,” a shop owner registered under the name Chou Chou_happy said.

Chou Chou_happy also provides a package service at her shop. A thousand followers plus 20 comments plus 400 tweets is priced at 229 yuan. Fifteen hundred followers plus 10 comments plus 500 tweets can be bought at 258 yuan. There’s no maximum limit in her shop but Chouchou_happy refused to reveal the secret of her business.

Stay tuned. I’ll probably have a few more social media posts coming along this month prior to that IP conference.
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1. Each device using the Net has an IP address associated with it. When you sign up for an account with a social network, your IP address is associated with your account. If you sign up for multiple accounts from the same device, all of those accounts will have the same IP address.[↩]

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