Finding fake followers, TikTok edition
As with every other social media platform, follower sales operations are abundant on TikTok
TikTok, like all popular social media platforms, has attracted the attention of the operators of various shady services that sell bogus social media engagement. Simply searching TikTok itself for phrases such as “buy followers” turns up numerous accounts purporting to offer services of this nature. One example is @buyfollowersinstant, a Tiktok account with zero videos posted or reposted, a link to an SMM (social media management) panel in its profile, and over four thousand eerily similar looking followers.
A quick stroll through @buyfollowersinstant’s 4328 visible followers reveals a streak of 4210 followers in a row with the same naming scheme. (The account’s most recent followers appear to be authentic.) Each of these accounts has the same handle as display name, and each name consists entirely of lowercase letters, digits, periods, and underscores — no capital letters whatsoever. Since authentic TikTok users employ a variety of naming schemes, and often use a different display name than handle, this anomaly is a clear indicator of bulk account creation and bulk follow activity orchestrated by a single entity.
The TikTok accounts in the fake follower network following @buyfollowersinstant have other traits in common beyond the telltale naming scheme. Each account has relatively few followers of its own but follows dozens or hundreds (and in some cases, thousands) of other accounts. The vast majority also have never posted; those which have generally have a handful of generic videos that do not in any way depict the account operator. The network is likely larger than the 4210 accounts following @buyfollowersinstant, but due to the lack of an easily accessible public API for retrieving TikTok data, the present analysis is limited to this set of fake accounts.
The accounts in this fake follower network utilize a variety of profile images, including several dozen with default avatars. Among the fake accounts are several with StyleGAN-generated faces, which remain perennially popular among spammers despite the availability of far more sophisticated AI image generation tools. The accounts in this spam network also reuse profile images, with the same (plagiarized) profile photos sometimes being used by multiple accounts.
The @buyfollowersinstant TikTok account’s profile contains a link to smmseven(dot)com, an SMM (social media marketing) panel that sells followers, likes, views, reposts, and other various forms of artificial amplification for a variety of social media platforms, including but not limited to TikTok. The maximum order size of one million followers is an additional data point suggesting that the network of fake TikTok accounts associated with the site is far larger than the 4210 fake accounts following @buyfollowersinstant. Like many SMM panels, smmseven(dot)com offers an API, allowing customers to automate orders.
The set of accounts followed by the spam network is widely varied, encompassing everything from personal accounts to business accounts to accounts advertising other spammy social media services. Many of these accounts appear to have few or no genuine users following them whatsoever.
This network is far from the only one of its kind presently active on TikTok; as mentioned earlier, finding additional examples of follower sales operations requires nothing more than searching TikTok itself for “buy followers”. It will be interesting to monitor how this situation evolves (or devolves) with the recent change in ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations.
