{"paper":{"title":"Followers or Phantoms? An Anatomy of Purchased Twitter Followers","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.SI","authors_text":"Anupama Aggarwal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru","submitted_at":"2014-08-07T10:39:52Z","abstract_excerpt":"Online Social Media (OSM) is extensively used by contemporary Internet users to communicate, socialize and disseminate information. This has led to the creation of a distinct online social identity which in turn has created the need of online social reputation management techniques. A significant percentage of OSM users utilize various methods to drive and manage their reputation on OSM. This has given rise to underground markets which buy/sell fraudulent accounts, `likes', `comments' (Facebook, Instagram) and `followers' (Twitter) to artificially boost their social reputation. In this study, "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1408.1534","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}