A Booming Trade in Fake Online Friends | MIT Technology Review

Sign of the times

"New research provides a fresh measure of the black market for creating false online reputations, but it also highlights a way to curb it.


“Crowdturfing,” as the phenomenon is known, is a combination of “crowdsourcing,” meaning recruiting large numbers of people to contribute a small effort each toward a big task (like labelling photos), and “astroturfing,” meaning false grassroots support (in the form of bogus reviews or comments, for example)."

A Booming Trade in Fake Online Friends | MIT Technology Review