Social Media Want You to Buy Followers

After failing to set serious entry barriers, the networks make a show of diligently detecting and suspending the bots. But some of them -- like the Star Wars botnet, set up as long ago as 2013 -- avoid detection because their creators know how the algorithms work. Others are disposable: They're just needed to spread some spam or help a political campaign. It's easy enough to produce more as needed.

Why are the account registration policies of the social media networks laxer than the entry policies of your standard U.S. nightclub? The usual argument is that they make it easier for dissidents living under oppressive regimes or for whistleblowers to make their voices heard. That explanation is harder to buy than a million Twitter followers, though. Oppressive regimes tend to ban U.S.-based social media. If they don't, they focus on developing detection mechanisms that work far better than the networks' algorithms dedicated to weeding out fakes. As a dissident or whistleblower, one would be extremely unwise to set up a public social media account, anonymous or not.

Another question to ask is why the social platforms make users' followers buy and subscriber numbers, as well as the numbers of likes and shares, so easily available. Taking them out of public access would remove the temptation to inflate them by paying for robotic "mercenaries" -- and it wouldn't detract from the content. Why turn one's life on the internet into a public competition? It should be enough for all practical purposes to release the audience numbers to the user and perhaps to advertisers, but not to the entire world.

It would be easy to stop fraud if the platforms really wanted to. How long will it take for someone like Attorney General Schneiderman to stop messing around with the likes of Devumi -- a fleck of dust on the tip of the iceberg -- and start digging into the social platforms' business models? It's not right that the only estimates of the number of fake accounts come from the platforms themselves. Nor is it right for these companies' stock valuations and ability to attract advertisers to be based on their own, unaudited user numbers. So far authorities have allowed this; in doing so they have let the enormous fraud market develop.