Distinguish Fake vs. Real Audience

Despite the NBA’s best efforts to filter out potential bot votes, concerns on the validity of vote results for a few lower profile athletes remained.

Graphika’s algorithm was used to:

1. Analyze more than 5 million tweets about the NBA All-Star voting;
2. Discover hyperactive bot accounts which voted about 1,000 times per day;
3. Identify voting entry points such as promotions by highly influential star Justin Bieber.

As a result of Graphika’s analysis:

1. The reasons for several players’ voting results were uncovered.
2. Seemingly suspicious voting results for one player were proven to be credible while others were shown to be manipulated.
3. The revealed vulnerabilities of the social media votes resulted in a change in the NBA’s voting system.