Psst! Have you heard? Many people, including politicians, celebrities, and reality-show hopefuls (but, we hope, not editors), are buying “large blocks of Twitter followers.”
So says Austin Considine in his article “Buying their way to Twitter fame” (The New York Times, August 22, 2012). He continues:
the practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.
Although Twitter “filed suit in federal court … against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers,” we suspect that few will be dissuaded from the practice; it’s cheap (as little as a penny a person) and easy (when we searched “buy Twitter followers” on Google, we received 8,490,000 hits), and we suspect that for every Twitter-follower provider Twitter shuts down, 10 new ones will emerge.
Read the complete article.
West Coast Editor 