Добро пожаловать, мои новые воображаемые русских друзей! Пожалуйста, наслаждайтесь Моя прекрасная блог и аккаунт в Twitter.
This, Google Translate tells me, is Russian for “Welcome, my new imaginary Russian friends! Please enjoy my fine blog and Twitter account.”
I popped onto Twitter this morning to discover that I have suddenly become popular in Russia again. Or at least in Imaginary Russia, home to countless imaginary Russians used by Twitterers who aren’t as popular as they want to be, in order to pad their follower account and make themselves look more popular. If you are so inclined, you can buy these imaginary Russians (and imaginary humans of many other nationalities) in bulk from specialists in the imaginary Russian Twitter user business.
I got a flood of fake Twitter followers generously gifted to me after I wrote about several A Voice for Menners and a certain Manosphere blogger turned #GamerGater who collectively have more than 70,000 fake Twitter followers.
It’s possible that the fake followers today are a sort of a weird retaliation for my post yesterday about Roosh Valizadeh’s short story about a dude killing a “social justice” blogger; the Manosphere-blogger-turned-GamerGater with the fake Twitter followers that I wrote about in my original post is good friends with Mr. V.
He has claimed that a lot of his fake followers were bought for him from someone else. So it’s possible he or his friends are trying to retroactively “prove” this by buying me fake followers, though this is just speculation on my part. Though it’s not clear how doing something unethical now (buying me and others fake Twitter followers) would be proof that you didn’t do something unethical before (buy Twitter followers for yourself).
At the very least, it shows that you know where to go to buy fake Twitter followers and how you can safely buy them without Russian hackers getting hold of your credit card number. (I have no idea.)
But, again, I have no proof of who did any of this. I’m just making educated guesses.
Jaclyn Friedman, who has tangled both with AVFMers and #GamerGaters in the past, and who got hit with fake followers at the same time I did before, also found herself with many thousands more fake Twitter followers today.
I set my Twitter account private about an hour ago to, at least temporarily, stem the tide of fake followers. (When your account is private, you have to approve any new followers; they aren’t added to your account automatically) Since then, I’ve gotten another 1300 fake followers trying to sneak in the door. I’ll be taking the account public again to tweet this post. We’ll see what happens.
Brilliant, dudes. No one will see through your cunning plan, whatever the hell your cunning plan is.
I sort of wish I could have this guy to handle my new Twitter followers.
EDIT: Removed an extra zero from a number. 1300 more would-be fake followers trying to sneak in, not 13,000.
It’s easy cover.
As long as a theoretical claim of hypocrisy can be laid out, people engaged in identity politics can view your criticisms as invalid.
The larger context, as always, can be ignored.
And hey, they can say “No it’s your minions buying you fake followers just like mine.” As if any of us care about your fame rather than amusing deconstructions of neomisogynists.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about manospherians and gamergaters, it’s that they will never ever ever hold any of their leaders accountable for anything they do, no matter how unethical.
Oh, and there’s also no claim a manosperian can make about a perceived enemy that will ever be called out as unreasonable by any other manospherian.
Just recently, that creepy Cernovich guy tweeted this:
Seriously, how fucking detached from reality do you have to be to believe PZ Myers of all people would go on a shooting spree? I can’t think of a single less likely event.
The weirdest thing about this is that these people are 30-50 years old, not ten. Seriously, most of us got bored of ding-dong-ditch and prank phone calls before we hit puberty…
I can.
An MRA saying or doing something that doesn’t make me want to vomit or at least facepalm for a few hours.
@M.
I was about to add that exact exception, but I had get started with dinner. Haha.
*had to..
Maybe if they think they buy enough, they can magically call you out with no one calling them out for their bullshit?
It’s actually very difficult to imagine PZ Meyers going on a shooting spree. It’s not that hard to imagine Cernovich doing it though. He’s so creepy.
I don’t think Cernovich is the type to go on a shooting spree, but it’s quite possible he might end up like that bloke Mr War Machine. Although I sincerely hope he doesn’t.
I’m sure he’ll be content to do his RRRRRGH I’M A LAWYER thing – it’ll be a while before he realizes it impresses nobody.
I suppose they are relying on the lack of hard evidence connecting any one of them to the follower purchase, therefore saying “look some mysterious individual purchased twitter followers for you, totes what happened to us!!”
Ochen’ priyatna, novuiye voabrazhayemuiye russkiye chitaeki! (Nice to meet you, new imaginary Russian readers!)
That google translate is surprisingly accurate (usually it just gets the meaning but with a bunch of stilted grammatical weirdness, but this got the meaning and was actually pretty grammatical even)
Heh. I studied Russian for three years in high school. I never even remotely understood the various cases, and can only remember a few words. I don’t even remember the full alphabet.
I really, really hated my Russian teacher. (I sort of got stuck in the class against my will.)
There’s a reactionary student paper at University of Minnesota Morris who blames missing and defaced issues on PZ. His evidence that PZ took the missing copies is that “there was a strong smell of formaldehyde lingering around the newsstand.” (paraphrase)
Campus police asked PZ to submit a handwriting sample so they could compare his handwriting to the defacing. They haven’t made their conclusions public yet, but it’s fodder for a sovereign citizen who’s harassing simply everyone with an email address at UMM, complaining about how he hasn’t been given a copy of the handwriting sample and that it’s an illegal violation of freedom of information.
We can tell he’s a sovereign citizen because he spells his name with a comma and phrases every sentence in his emails as a question by adding “doesn’t it,” “isn’t it,” or something similar to the end.
I hope Katz doesn’t bring her red pen….
Typo patrol:
The text says you’ve received 13,000 follower requests but the screenshot actually shows 1,300
Three years of Russian…? Lives in Chicago…?
David, did you… did you go to IMSA?
i wish this imaginary Russian would follow me:
http://romancebandits.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Illya.jpg
Not to worry, I don’t know nearly enough Russian to go around correcting people.
Oh, sorry. Don’t know where I got that impression.
Добро пожаловат, мои новые, выдуманные русские друзя. Пожалуйста, наслаждайтесь моим прекрасным блогом и аккаунтом в Twitter.
Google got it quite right, actually. And that’s my version, though my Russian is far from excellent, despite working in a Russian company.
Awesome! Everyone I know who studied Russian in high school hated it and their teachers and didn’t learn anything, apparently.
I was in a relationship with a Russian man for 13 years – because of this, I started out taking classes because I wanted to understand what he and all his friends were talking about, but then ended up getting a degree in it and living there (Saint Petersburg) for a while.
Yeah, I wish David McCallum would follow me too :))
Or at least Ilya Kuryakin