Member Avatar for Caitlyn_1

Can you suggest some great accurate ways by which I can track fake ad real accounts?

Edited by Dani because: Moved to correct forum
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Building on ’s point about third‑party tools and the heuristics mentioned by and , here is a compact, practical workflow and a few deeper checks that aren’t covered above.

Start with a few verifiable signals that are easy to apply at scale: run a reverse‑image search on the profile photo to catch stolen pictures (use TinEye or Google Images), check the public “Joined” date on the profile (sudden bursts of accounts created on the same day can indicate coordinated creation), and sample posting timestamps for unnaturally regular intervals (bots often post on formulaic schedules). Next, inspect the account’s link behavior: repeated use of the same shortener/domain or a pattern of redirects to low‑quality sites is a strong indicator of automation or spam. For network context, look at who retweets, mentions, and is followed by the account — clusters of accounts that all retweet each other suggest coordination rather than genuine engagement.

For automated scoring and research‑grade checks use an independent academic tool as a second opinion. Botometer (OSoMe) provides a bot‑likelihood score and is widely used in studies; combine that with academic literature on detection methods to interpret results rather than treating any single number as definitive (Botometer, Ferrara et al., 2016: The rise of social bots, Varol et al., 2017: online detection methods).

Caveats: no single signal proves an account is fake. Public profile fields and tweet metadata can be manipulated and Twitter/X policies and API access change over time. Respect privacy and platform rules when investigating; for high‑risk cases (fraud, threats, coordinated disinformation) escalate to law enforcement or platform abuse reporting rather than attempting intrusive deanonymization.

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Member Avatar for Amara Laurent

There are plenty of tools that claims that they identify fake followers.
But the tool must be accurate and worth investing in! I personally use Followeraudit to identify fake or real followers of any public Twitter account.

Reasons why I use it –

  1. Its gives accurate results.
  2. The results are published within few minutes.
  3. Affordable pricing plans.
  4. With its affordable plans they also provide with other features which I think is best
  5. You also get a list of all the fake and inactive followers.
Edited by Dani because: Relevant
Member Avatar for Dani

As a twitter user, you can't tell where another twitter account was created from, nor do you have direct access to the twitter database. You have to just look at it at face value, such as how many tweets it has, how many followers it has, who the followers are, etc.

Member Avatar for Dani

That doesn't let you filter people by their home location. It lets you filter specific tweets where the user chose to specify their location as part of the tweet. (e.g. to tweet that they visited a particular place)

Member Avatar for rproffitt

The data you can mine using the link provided plus other methods do seem to let you build up the information you would need to build a profile about fake accounts.

Mind you I am writing about creation of a system and not about what is out there today. There are companies and apps already out there. My thoughts are "How could we do this ourselves?"

As to direct accesss to the twitter database well, let's not get into facebook and twitter data leaks or more such as
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/07/18/twitter-hackers-successfully-manipulated-a-small-number-of-employees-stole-personal-data-from-at-least-8-targeted-accounts/

Given some cash and a pretty face I bet you can get the data you want from almost any company.

commented: This was posted in the Cloud Based Apps forum under Hardware/Software so it's directed towards users who need help using existing tools and apps +34
Member Avatar for rproffitt

Caitlyn seems to work hard to talk up that app on the web. It's almost like they work there!

Edited by rproffitt because: Revision.
commented: Perhaps ;) +0
Member Avatar for Rythorian

If they are "Egg Heads" it's a good sign. I'm Referring to the Twitter user in question not taking the time to upload a profile image.
They use stock profile image.
No Bio.
Duplicate Tweets.
Screen Name /URL Combination anomalies.
Incoherant tweets.
Hasn't tweeted in months/years.
Follows a ridiculous amount of people (in the thousand range)
Avoids interactions with others.
Low followers or none at all.
Unrealistic amount of tweets.

I personally have a better method to identify someone, but it rides a thin red line as far as legality goes. If it seems wrong, I'd go with your instincts. Instincts have served us well for centuries...lol.

Edited by Rythorian
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