So last week I pointed out that several A Voice for Menners, as well as one of #GamerGate’s E-list celebrities, had managed to amass impressive armies of fake Twitter followers — more than 70,000 amongst the four of them. Generally speaking, one does not get that many fake followers unless one literally buy them from the sort of sleazy people who make a living selling fake Twitter followers in order to make oneself appear more popular.
The next day some generous soul bought me well over a thousand fake followers to call my own. When I wrote my post, I had a bit more than 5000 followers. Now I have more than 7000, with most of the new additions obviously fake accounts with Russian names, a tiny handful of spammy Tweets to their credit, and pretty much zero followers of their own. Here are a couple of them:
I can only hope that Марков and Павел — and all my new Russian friends — are enjoying my incisive commentary on the issues of the day.
Whoever came up with the idea of putting three things in a row must be so fucking rich by now.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) February 7, 2015
Whoever bought me the followers did the same to @UnseenPerfidy, one of the Twitter users who ran “Twitter Audits” on AVFMers in the first place, and, a bit more strangely, to feminist writer and activist Jaclyn Friedman, who had merely retweeted a link to my post on the subject.
So who bought us these fake followers, and why? Was it some troll just trying to be annoying? Or was it someone from AVFM, hoping that they could pull off some sort of fake “gotcha” by revealing that Jacklyn, @UnseenPerfidy and I all had fake followers?
The fact that whoever it was targeted Jaclyn as well as me and @UnseenPerfidy makes me think it was likely the latter; of all of the people who retweeted a link to my story, she’s the only one I know of that AVFM has called a “fascist.”
As she put it, after being inundated with a flood of highly suspicious new followers,
https://twitter.com/jaclynf/status/563472995436744706
Originally I was going to go through and block my obviously fake new followers. After blocking about half a dozen of them I discovered that this is a very, very boring way to spend your time.
So I will go back to putting three (or more) things in a row in Candy Crush Soda Saga instead.
@maghaven:
Also STRAWMAN! You know, for that complete Internet feel.
So Ivan Markoff and Paul Zhukoff are finally getting with the program and following WHTM!
So it seems as though MRAs would rather spend their time and money on cheap point-scoring against feminists than actually do something productive about the issues they profess to care about?
If unseenperfidy got hit too then perhaps it was Gators rather than MRAs. Of course that distinction is growing less meaningful day by day.
Yeah, it’s definitely beginning to feel like a “po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to” thing.
Not enough eye roll gif indeed
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140704003938/degrassi/images/d/dd/Liz-lemon-eye-roll.gif
Weren’t a few of them trying to claim that Esmay etc couldn’t have bought fake followers because they didn’t know how to? So much for that excuse.
Oh, FFS, how immature.
If you ever happen to see an MRA acting in a mature matter, kindly let us know about it. It seems to me that refusal to grow up is their most consistent characteristic. (Maybe that’s why they don’t do so well in child custody determinations?)
I’m so used to stupid stunts from the MRM, but I’m honestly astounded someone actually *paid money* for this thing. Seriously??? It’s easy to rag on them for whining on the Internet instead of actual activism or donations, but that kind of makes sense–after all, actual work takes actual time and effort.
But no, turns out they’re perfectly willing to spend money for ‘men’s rights’…to prove an asinine point against a feminist blogger. Because one feminist blog pointing out MRAs are buying followers is the gravest threat to men today.
MOAR EYEROLL!
http://i.imgur.com/suhlfDr.gif
David, have you tried Dungeon Hearts? It’s a match-3 game with some Guitar Hero and RPG elements! It goes fast, so it’s challenging, but it’s also pretty fun!
http://www.devolverdigital.com/games/view/dungeon-hearts
You play as four warriors (A fighter, a mage, a monk and an archer) out to fight evil monsters, and the gems scroll along right to left on your screen, and you have to match three of them in order to attack. Though if you match more, you get stronger attacks and stuff too!
Best part? NO micropayments!
_______________________________
On topic: This is a pretty lame (and obvious) attempt at a gotcha. I’m glad there’s blocker programs out there though.
Oh, probably. Otherwise the judge would have to award custody of them back to their ex-wives, who are trying to get rid of them precisely because they won’t be potty-trained at their age.
I mean, if you throw a tantrum in court, that’s not likely to impress a judge with your qualifications as a parent. Children are marvelous but they are not generally known for their parenting skills.
Frankly, women tend to win contested custody cases because they are, on the whole, more involved, better parents. But I have seen a great increase in men being involved with their children and improvement in their parenting skills over the last 50 years — which coincidentally (or not) has been the time of the most recent wave of feminism. I suppose that there has been some feminist somewhere who has thought that men being more involved with their children is a bad thing, but I have not heard of it.
GrumpyOldMan: Actually, I think that in ~contested~ cases, fathers are much more likely to win full custody than women. There’s just a massive number of cases where the fathers never try for so much as joint custody. This blog links to some of the studies that have been done: http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2012/04/child_supportcu.html
Now, it’s often been suggested in discussions I’ve seen that fathers are often discouraged from seeking custody by their attorneys, under the outdated notion that the law is biased towards the mother (this WAS true until the 1970s, for the record–that’s when the courts moved from the ‘tender years’ doctrine that favored mothers to the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine, which often favors the more financially stable parent–who is most often the father). However, that’s a case of poor legal representation at this point in time.
“the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine”
Ah, that’s what we have here in Blighty. I wonder which jurisdiction adopted it first.
You can block followers quickly using Followerwonk, or (I think) Justunfollow
Freemage: On the other hand, I am told that men are often advised to contest custody in order to get their exes to reduce their child-support requests, or they may do it just out of anger at having been left (if you leave me I’ll take the kids away from you) or something like that. I think it is very hard to draw conclusions from the statistics because the cases that actually get decided by the courts may not be (in fact, probably aren’t) representative of divorces in general — it may well be that the majority of cases that are seriously contested are ones in which there is a real question whether the mother is the better parent. Or it may be that the courts are overly sympathetic to men in trying to reverse the traditional bias toward women as primary caregivers. But in any case, it is clear that the “tender years” doctrine is dead.
EVEN MOAR EYEROLL
http://replygif.net/692
Well that didn’t work.