All Followers Are Fake Followers
In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?” I asked. We’d both added tens of thousands of apparent fans over the previous year or so.
Foddy, an unpresuming Australian with a doctorate in moral philosophy who now makes video games that purposely abuse their players, encouraged me not to get too chuffed about my entourage. We’d both been added to a list of accounts that are recommended to new Twitter users during the sign-up process, he explained. Many of our new followers were fake, created for the purposes of spam or resale. They had followed us automatically.
Even so, their effect was real: Foddy and I looked far more popular and important than our cronies. A colleague of Foddy’s at New York University, passed over by Twitter for such largesse, had become so agitated that he’d cornered Foddy to ask if he was buying followers. The whole matter was a Pandora’s box that I kept carefully hidden and firmly closed.
Last weekend, opened it up. The paper ran an about the story opens with geometrically fractured portraits of the model Kathy Ireland, the athlete Ray Lewis, and the actor John Leguizamo. They are presented like modern mug shots of fraudsters caught in the act.
