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Blog: Your Twitter Followers are Probably Bots

Twitter
Jason Tate

Elaine:

The New York Times had an interesting feature over the weekend in which it calls out various social media influencers for follower fraud. Many people who appear to have huge Twitter followings actually don’t, and their fans are in fact paid-for bots. Oooh, busted! Apparently there’s a class of people who make a career out of being popular on Twitter, and it is terribly scandalous that they are not as cool as they might seem. […]

The NYTimes analysis is compelling, but their target account selection was awfully limited. So I reproduced their Twitter tool to continue the investigation.

This is pretty cool. I’ve told this story before, but a few years back we ran a story on AbsolutePunk.net about how a certain band member in a certain band had most certainly paid for followers on Twitter. His (very mature) response was to buy a bunch of followers on my account. To this day I don’t really know how many were part of that (I tried to block and report a bunch of them at the time), but I do know that once my account got “verified” I see random, clearly bot, accounts start following me all the time.

Now, Now and Kevin Devine Discuss Mental Health

Now Now
Jason Tate

Anna Acosta sat down with Now, Now and Kevin Devine to talk about mental health:

My biggest problem is that if I don’t want to feel something, I don’t feel something. I’ll just be like, I’m not going there right now. I have too many things to do. And I’ll just compartmentalize and not deal with whatever it is, but in order to be able to write I have to access every emotional part of my brain. So when we’re writing, if I’ve been doing that lately, if we’ve been dealing with a lot of stress or if something’s been going on in my personal life, it’ll come out when we’re writing.

The Grammys Are Out of Touch

Grammys
Jason Tate

Hazel Cills, writing for The Muse:

Out of 899 people nominated for the last six Grammy Awards, a new report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that only nine percent of those people were women. And we still don’t know the race, gender, and age breakdown of the 24,000 member Recording Academy itself, which leads to an Academy that can only conceive of excellent women artists in the form of Adele and Taylor Swift. It’s this out-of-touch mindset that is partly destroying the Grammys’ ratings, with the ceremony hitting an all-time low this year. And who would blame anyone for not tuning in, considering Best Album winner Adele disputed her own win last year?

Rock Is Alive — But You Might Not Know It When You Hear It

Pete Wentz
Jason Tate

Pete Wentz, transcribed in Variety:

Today, you can’t necessarily think, “Rock music has to be this and it can’t be that.” We’re challenging the notion of what rock music can be. Listening to a playlist might mean going from a Beatles song into Twenty One Pilots into Lil Yachty. Kids are going to arenas to see Imagine Dragons and to hear those big songs. But they’re also checking out Bleachers and Jack Antonoff; he’s one of the biggest pop producers — one who clearly approaches songs as a kid in his bedroom listening to punk rock.

YouTube’s Support for Musicians Comes With a Catch

YouTube
Jason Tate

Lucas Shaw, writing at Billboard:

In recent months, YouTube has given a handful of musicians a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce videos and promote their work on billboards, part of a larger campaign to improve the site’s relationship with the music industry.

Yet such support comes with a catch, with some musicians required to promise the won’t say negative things about YouTube, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private business transactions. Non-disparagement agreements are common in business, but YouTube’s biggest direct competitors in music don’t require them, the people said.

Abuse of Power and the Legacy of Jesse Lacey

Jason Tate

Emily Driskill, writing on Medium:

My biggest fear now is that Brand New will tour again in 2018. Quite frankly, in any other job, in any other industry — Jesse would have been fired and blacklisted. But this is the music industry and Brand New clearly doesn’t have a fucking HR department. […]

How do we change any of this? I know holding yourself and others accountable is paramount. I know supporting Women Of Color and LGBTQ artists in the music and touring communities is of the utmost importance. I know boycotting or picketing shows of artists who don’t speak out against abuse of power in the industry is necessary.

Spotify Launches Spotlight, a Multimedia Take on Podcasts

Jason Tate

Megan Farokhmanesh, writing for The Verge:

Spotify announced today that it’s expanding its audio slate to include “visual podcasts” about news, politics, and entertainment. These shows, available in playlist form, will feature a multimedia component that includes text, video, and photos as part of a new format that Spotify is calling “Spotlight.”

Meh, I listen to podcasts while doing other things and have my phone in my pocket, not sure I need “multimedia content” with my podcasts. Spotify should instead open up their directory of podcasts to everyone. The beauty of podcasting is that virtually anyone can do it and share it with the world through an RSS feed. Spotify’s podcast section shuts out thousands of independent publishers.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Quest to Defend Pop Punk

The Dangerous Summer
Jason Tate

Luke O’Neil, writing at Noisey:

A lot of our drivers, I think, listen to country or current pop. Nothing that’s really too much behind that first layer. I’ve always needed a little bit more than that. I’ve always enjoyed the search for something different or something a little more substantial. I always thought if I wasn’t racing one of my dream jobs would be as a scout, going town to town and trying to find bands in all these little dive bars. That would be so much fun, discovering music that way as opposed to from your phone.

Nazi Punks Fuck Off

Black Flag
Jason Tate

Steve Knopper, writing at GQ:

Every hardcore band you loved in the ’80s and beyond, from Black Flag to Minutemen to Fugazi, had one unfortunate thing in common: Nazi skinheads occasionally stormed their concerts, stomped their fans, gave Hitler salutes in lieu of applauding, and generally turned a communal experience into one full of hatred and conflict. […]

Here’s an oral history on how punks took back their scene.

This is great.

How One Employee ‘Pushed the Wrong Button’ and Caused a Wave of Panic

The Washington Post
Jason Tate

Amy Wang, writing at The Washington Post:

Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert.

Pop-Up Mobile Ads Surge as Sites Scramble to Stop Them

Jason Tate

Lily Hay Newman, writing at Wired:

These redirects can show up seemingly out of the blue when you’re in a mobile browser like Chrome, or even when you’re using a service like Facebook or Twitter and navigating to a page through one of their in-app browsers. Suddenly you go from loading a news article to wriggling away from an intrusive ad. What enables these ad redirects to haunt virtually any browser or app at any time, rather than just the sketchy backwaters in which they used to roam? Third-party ad servers that either don’t vet ad submissions properly for the JavaScript components that could cause redirects, or get duped by innocent-looking ads that hide their sketchy code.

Not a day goes by that I don’t get pitched some variation of these kinds of ads for this website. They promise thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and it seems like a lot of big websites are saying yes to these third party ad networks. I think it’s killing the internet.

Paramore Reflect in Australia

Jason Tate

Paramore sat down with MusicFeeds:

There are nights where I think it’s harder or we’ll be playing and I’ll sing a line that I haven’t thought about in a while and it’ll hit me differently. But I think that’s good. I mean, I’m only speaking for myself here but I think that’s healthy. You sort of have to sort of look in the mirror every now and then and really reflect on what it is you said about your life and the difference in maybe how you feel now. And in a lot of ways, I think it’s been healing for all of us to get out and play these songs for people.

Mixing The Aquabats With Cameron Webb

Jason Tate

Cameron Webb (who has worked with Sum 41, NOFX, Pennywise, and many more) has a new video tutorial at Promix Academy on “Mixing The Aquabats:”

In this course, Grammy winner Cameron Webb lets you look over his shoulder, as he re-mixes The Aquabats! most popular single ‘Super Rad!’, which boasts millions of streams on Spotify and Youtube – even 20 years after its release.

Cameron lets you in on his mixing secrets and shows you how achieve clarity, energy and impact in your mix, while preserving the musical vision of the artist.