What the hell is a Navy?

From the early term "zombie powder" to the present micro-blog frequently appeared on the "Navy", many people in the process of wits and also slowly understand this batch of special Weibo account. But what is the Navy? In fact, the industry does not have a recognized definition. The intimate relationship between the Navy and the marketing account also makes people very confused, who should be regarded as the Navy? Does the Navy have the same meaning as zombie powder? This article will make a clear definition of the Navy, explain what is the Navy.

First, where does the word "Navy" come from?

Remember a long time ago, "Jia, your mother called you Home for dinner" incident? The investigation confirmed that this is a carefully planned, and then through the organizer of the Forum to carry out the water top paste of the public opinion manipulation events. The first meaning of the Navy is to refer to a large number of people in the Forum. But with the development of the network, now the Navy has been through multiple development, has long been no longer the forum of the mercenaries to irrigation. A qualitative change, that is, with the development of micro-blogging gradually displayed in people's Eyes-zombie powder.

The biggest difference between zombie powder and the former navy is that zombie powders are manipulated by machines, replacing expensive human operations, and successfully evolving from previous hand-top stickers to machine automation. "Zombie powder" refers to all controlled social network accounts, including externally controlled robots (BOT) and Gaoziwo (cyborg), which mainly emphasize "stiff" and ignore "controlled", the paper said in Socialbeta's article of November 30, 2011. In fact, the activities of the Zombie, that is, micro-bo marketing industry cyborg nature of the "Navy" is the micro-Bo ecological Circle of the main source of harm. ”

In this paper, we first think that the definition of zombie powder should have a narrow and broad sense of the point. The narrow sense of zombie powder is only a false account of one, the main purpose is to add powder, so called zombie powder.

And the broad sense of zombie powder, is a micro-blog is the false account of the appearance. Therefore, the definition of zombie powder is defined as: machine-controlled, without human feelings, through the algorithm manipulated by the volume of false accounts, low activity, its existence will be real users of the actual influence and normal use of pollution and confusion.

So, zombie powder is this article about the Navy?

Answer: They are essentially the same, but they are different in form. Here's a simple explanation: The Navy is an army of zombie powder. Zombie powder can only be scattered sneak attacks, and the navy usually take in droves of large-scale operations. For example, for example, your account appears: "Your Weibo won!" Brush Powder * * * * * Such words, such as the message of the account is called Zombie powder, I believe that both celebrities and the masses have contact with it.

And if one day you find an ad to paste a short time there are thousands of forwarding! And there are a lot of comments: "is authentic!" My husband said it was very nice! I bought it for my colleagues, she likes it very much! " ...... And so on, please believe that this is the Navy!

So back to the original question of this article: what is the Navy?

For this concept, the foreign Hewlett-Packard Lab defines this as:

As these accounts post a tweets, tightly tend to set up many other fake accounts to continuously retweet this tweet, expecting High retweet numbers would propel the tweets to place in the Sina Weibo hourly trending list. (some accounts sent a micro-blog, they take the use of many other fake accounts to forward this tweet, so as to achieve a high number of forwarding, so as to promote the microblogging board on Sina's topic list)

HP Laboratory definition is earlier, according to the current situation of the development of the Navy, it is not enough to describe.

The definition of the Navy in the Wired Web site is a more accepted definition of the current network. Several articles refer to this word to denote the Navy--crowdtrufing (hiring arranges to send political and corporate over propaganda social for NX a Message). But its definition of the Navy is still more one-sided and not enough to be used as the definition of the Navy, so this article gives its own definition:

On Weibo, the Navy refers to a batch of Weibo accounts that are used by machine algorithms to manipulate and use a large number of false accounts to work together on a Twitter account, called the Navy, which serves a specific microblogging service.

Why is the Navy often inseparable from marketing accounts?

The truth in this is very simple. Companies want to advertise on Weibo, demand to reach a certain amount of forwarding, found a microblogging marketing platform. Microblogging marketing platform in order to complete the enterprise-mandated forwarding volume, usually use two methods:

The first is to use marketing large band forwarding;

The second is the direct use of the Navy to complete the task, sometimes the two combined. So it's easy to confuse the Navy and the marketing tuba because they're too close.

To sum up, whether it is the early forum irrigation of the Navy, or later zombie powder, micro-BO Navy, its nature are false, manipulated by the bad products. A healthy green social platform is not supposed to appear in these false accounts. When will the Navy in Weibo be wiped out? This is still an unanswered question.

References:

1 Weibo Baidu Encyclopedia, http://baike.baidu.com/view/1567099.htm

2 "How to identify Zombie powder" information entropy, Turing Test and the future of digital social networks, from Socialbeta http://www.socialbeta.cn/articles/weibo-zombie.html

3 Artificial inflation:the True Story of Trends in Sina Weibo, from HP Lab ' s Social Computing Lab

4 Sina Weibo Trends manipulated by fraudulent Accounts? From HP lab ' s Social Computing Lab

The author of this article: @ Ring Lights New Light