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.
Well, it’s the cohort of people who prove that false rape accusations exist by making false rape accusations.
I think the idea is probably plausible deniability: Look, you didn’t buy your followers, someone else did, so it’s unfair to assume we bought ours ourselves
I’m just amazed they have enough money lying around after their latest fedora-and-Axe body spray shopping spree.
How much does that cost?
I wish they gave money to organisations that actually help men instead (A Voice for Men not qualifying here).
I am not sure if this works (I don’t use twitter) but take a look at these pages for removing fake accounts:
http://followersbegone.com/
http://www.mastermindblogger.com/11-twitter-cleaner-tools-to-get-rid-of-spams/
There are others so probably just have a look around and find one that works for you 😉
I must admit, I was looking forward to this one ever since you mentioned it on Twitter. I follow Unseen Perfidy and I saw him talking about it, but I didn’t realise it happened to a third person. When I think of the things that could have been done with that money.
Add “bulk actions involving fake accounts” to the features Twitter should add.
What a stupid thing to waste money on. I guess men aren’t so oppressed after all if they have the money to spend on this.
See! This is what people are talking about. These people’s complete lack of priorities. All that money could’ve been used to donate to a homeless shelter or Mens Crisis Center, anything the ACTUALLY helps men. Instead, they use the money to try to make their opponents look bad of for some kind of gotcha moment.
I think my previous comment got stuck in moderation.
It’s only $1 for 1,000 or $5 for 10,000 followers from my brief google search. But yes, totally messed up priorities.
There’s apparently a bulk twitter-bot deleter at followerbegone dot com. You can paste their script in a do a massive bot flush. If you google “delete twitter followers” you’ll find the step-by-step article.
From what I understand, fake followers aren’t exactly expensive, which is exactly why this is such a common practice, so probably not a great deal of money was wasted here.
But yes, typical of the “human rights champions of the 21st century”, to basically plant fake evidence against other people, for a phony “the other side does it as well!” defence. And they think they’re the good guys?
@giliell That may be giving them a bit too much credit.
But in any event, the difference remains that when Dave and the others noticed they had fake followers, they said so.
What an amazingly absurd thing for a person to do with their day.
Gilliel: I think that’s more thought than they put into it.
That’s still a dollar or five dollars that could have gone to prostate cancer research.
Doing something about those issues? Why? That would undermine their talking points! :p
There’s probably a fake-follower autoblocker around somewhere.
“Block all the eggs! Except Denny’s.” (The Denny’s CEO is an egg.)
If you want to get rid of them, I can probably whip up a script to do it – consider it a donation to the site 🙂 But what laughable pettiness!
Yeah, they were hoping for a “gotcha!” Sorry, kids, better luck next time.
They don’t seem to realise that even if David and the others had bought Twitter followers–which they didn’t!–it’s still a dishonest (and laughable) thing to do.
“You do it too!” aka “tu quoque” is a fallacy.
They’re not just jerks. They’re simple-minded and dishonest jerks.
FALSE FLAG! David Futrelle bought them himself just to impugn MRAs! FALSE FLAG!
Sorry, but no internet discussion of almost anything would be complete without someone making this accusation.
Please continue.
Hey David, maybe you should post that AVfM has a suspicious surplus of chocolate. See if you can get them to buy you some.
@Buttercup
I wouldn’t eat any chocolate given by an MRA…
Dave I follow you for realzies.
freebsdgirl made an auto-blocker for gators, maybe she can make a similar tool for fake followers?
Somewhere in Russia, the real Pavel Markov and Ivan Zhukov are scratching their heads over this, wondering how they got turned into eggs…
@Spindrift David doesn’t have to eat it. The real point is getting them to waste their money. Which seems remarkably easy to do.
Purchasing large numbers of followers is not surprisingly against the Twitter rules ( https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules ; see the first entry under the section on Spam ) however I would be fairly sure Twitter are aware some people purchase followers for targets they wish to harass; it becomes impossible to find the legitimate followers amidst all the spam.
Blocktogether might be another tool allowing you to block all these ‘egg’ accounts, assuming they are all the same as ‘Pavel’ and ‘Markov’.