Haha! Such a great function of “Zombie Fans”! I wonder what’s their price for such a service. Is it the same bunch of people who do the “adds fans” business doing this? Does Sina Microblog have any method to eliminate the influence of spams in microblog trending?
The suspected spam accounts affect a majority of the trend-setters in our sample, helping them raise the retweet number of their posts and thereby making their posts appear on the trending list. The overall effect of the spammers is very significant. We also observed that a high 98 percent of the total trending keywords can be found in posts retweeted by suspected spam accounts. Thus it can also be argued that many of the trends themselves are artificially generated, which is a very important result. (via Report: Half of All Retweets on Sina Weibo are Spam | Tech in Asia)
