

The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers - swombat
http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to-game-twitter-fake-followers

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joshwa
Ev responds:

[http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to-
game-...](http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to-game-twitter-
fake-followers#comment-6353220)

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timf
And to save you some time: this is a non-story or at least a mischaracterized
one.

At this link he says the follower surges on the accounts in question are from
Twitter's new "suggested people to follow" page at signup time.

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dhimes
That's how I started following Penn Jillette. On the other hand, I have my
profile pic uploaded.

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jwesley
Another explanation might be an increase in Twitter spam. I can only speak for
myself, but I've been getting tons a spammy followers over the past couple
weeks. You'd think that the most popular accounts (like the ones highlighted
in the article) would see the highest levels of spam, thus the sharp increase
in new followers. I'm sure the suggested followers feature Ev mentioned plays
a part as well.

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ruddzw
This is what happens when your research leads you down one path instead of
checking the obvious sources first. These people are on the list of suggested
users: <http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions> Twitter is suggesting
people follow these people.

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doug_m
I'm not much of a twitter user but the uptake in the general public in the UK
in the last two weeks is crazy - its gone from no-one to everyone in the space
of a week.

Personally I think there was some kind of internal BBC briefing about using
twitter for publicity - then the radio 1 jocks logged profiles all in the same
weekend, started talking about it daily the week after and so started a
snowball from the publicity.

Could that explain some of it?

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teej
I noticed a sharp increase in local Twitter usage on the radio here as well
(US) a few weeks ago. That was most likely in response to Britney Spears'
account getting hacked.

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TrevorJ
Man, if this is true it seems pretty pathetic.

