I am killing it in the imaginary Russian demographic.
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.
Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in.
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.
