Social Media's Black Market plays huge impact on user trust!!

You may want to think twice or even more before accepting friend request or replying to new friend on Twitter or facebook. New research is following to increase some light on the growing black market dealing in buying & selling fake social media followers. And just what impact it will have on social media, we will about this in this article.

The reality is now that it is easy to buy fake followers.  A recent study by Barracuda Labs which has found 20 sellers of fake accounts on only in a website like eBay alone. This research also found that 58 of the top 100 Google search results for "buy Twitter followers" sold fake followers, which is 40 percent of e set up in the past six months. On an average, the cost is surprisingly reasonable that costing around 1,000 followers only for $18.

While this issue is comparatively new, which has been in the news more as of late since Facebook announced that 83 Million Facebook Accounts Are Fake. And Mitt Romney's Twitter account began to see large spikesin the number of followers last week.

Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks said, “Fake users are really a huge concern to both Facebook & Twitter, it is a threat to create user trust, online security and the overall community feeling of the social networks." He also said, "This obviously that the threatens advertising revenue as organizations which begin to question the true visibility & reach of their ad campaigns."

 Buying followers is among the most logical reasons for businesses as well as boosting ad revenue which have to engage in the process since advertising is often sold based on the number of followers a company or profile has.  

There is also an opportunity for people who create and sell these profiles to earn money from selling tweets and re-tweets from these fake accounts. 

According to Jason Ding, research scientist at Barracuda and lead researcher on the study said, "Based on our studies, we noticed that there are 75 % of people who buy followers have a Web address in their Twitter account." He also said "That means they can buy these followers to advertise their website or Web page as well to boost their income."

Ding said that companies can create a lot of revenue by buying these followers.  But, we not sure exactly how much or what percentage it can increase their business. Though, The business is booming tremendously now a days.

If this trend continues, there may have an even greater impact on the future of social media badly.

Ding said that if this trend keeps going, people will lose their trust in the social platform and there will be less and less value for a company to utilize a social platform. If people keep buying & selling fake followers the overall trust on sites like Facebook and Twitter will be gradually decreased at a huge rate. As a result people will no longer trust each other on social media. 

There are a few ways to spot fake accounts. Firstly, a majority of fake profiles are less than three months old with the average age of a fake account being 19 days. 

Secondly, the average abuser who buys followers has 48,885 followers while the average fake account is following 1,799 people still now by a research.