Exposing The Fake Known As Kahawa Tungu – Part 1

So recently, there has been a blogger who has been trying to make a name for himself by posting hard hitting articles to his website: kahawatungu.blogspot.com

He has also been on Twitter using the handle @kahawatungu. The account, being recently created, had under one thousand followers last week, but as of yesterday had shot up to over over 56,000 followers, and in the space of one day, dropped to around 46,000 followers.

These high fluctuations in followers aroused my suspicions. First of all, increasing by over 50,000 followers in a week would probably be some sort of record. Even big names such as @koinangejeff and @safaricomltd had to work for long periods of time for their followers. Could @kahawatungu’s brand be more powerful than those mentioned above, or is there something afoot?

Secondly, why the dramatic dip in followers overnight? Might it be that 10,000 people naturally got sick of him overnight, or is there something more sinister behind this? I set out to find the truth of the matter.

Some time in 2012, it was discovered that there was an underground industry forming in the Twitter ecosystem. Hackers had found ways to easily generate fake Twitter accounts en masse, and sell them as followers for extraordinarily low prices. Some hackers can be found selling over 10,000 Twitter followers for as low as 5$.

Sounds like the best way to get Twitter followers, doesn’t it? But here’s the catch: what the hackers don’t tell you is that after an unspecified period of time, their fake accounts usually unfollow you in the blink of an eye, and when you ask what happened, you are presented with a request to pay to get your followers back. When you look at how @kahawatungu lost 10,000 followers in the span of 1 day, it fits that narrative.

But that’s all still very speculative. We need cold hard evidence to support any allegations, lest we find ourselves sued for libel. Thankfully, after the Twitter followers scandal broke out, social media management company Status People came out with a tool to identify who’s followers are real, and who’s are fake. Aptly named the Fake Follower Check, it is simply a program that checks publicly available details of your followers, such as number of tweets, account creation date, profile completion percentage and more, to check the validity of your Twitter followers. If the accounts of your followers observe patterns seen in fake followers, such as having next to zero tweets, no profile picture, no retweets, suspicious follower-to-following ratio et cetera, then Status People’s tool can tell you the percentage of fake followers a Twitter account has. These are the results of the Status People fake follower check for @KahawaTungu :

A scientific process shows that only 27% of his followers are legitimate. 

Exposing the fake known as Kahawa Tungu – Part 2 coming soon.