Love this article

It's a shame a pay-for-followers company could expose people who use their services so easily. Personally, I prefer LikeDiva.com when I need a boost in my social media presence. They offer a very easy website to navigate and have never dropped the ball like Devumi.com clearly has.

Twitter recently reported an increase in usage in the latest earnings quarter (after a slow period). Any possibility that new activity was bot driven?

New York Times, well done. Congratulations to Nicholas, Gabriel and Rich: this is one of the finest feats of investigative reporting your newspaper has ever done and I for one would like to see more.

Thanks so much for bringing this to light. I'm waiting for Instagram to follow suit and aggressively go after fake followers. As someone who works in advertising, I really want the industry to embrace hiring influencers with authentic reach.

I would be even more interested in an analysis of the account of somebody *cough, cough* who is well-known for tweeting and having a large number of followers. And an analysis of the purported geographic locations of said followers....

I opened accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. when they started using different nom de plumes for each so as to be clever and not to be harassed. i've never posted on any other than Facebook yet I keep getting emails that so-amd-so is following me. Facebook keeps notifying me that various people want to be Friends; one they recently advised me about doesn't even have a comuter anymore and another is a relative who didn't make the request. BTW, the name i used here is my nom-de-NYT.

For the sake of transparency, I feel that the NYTimes should publish a complete list of everyone that purchased fake twitter followers.

I don't twitter. Yay! I don't own a cell phone, only a landline. Yay! And I use FB sparingly, only with folks I actually know.

Plainly stealing someone else's identity is a crime and should be stopped or punished. Beyond that, though, I see it more as buyer beware. Who is impressed by the number of followers an individual has? I certainly am not. If an employer is going to pay more to an individual based upon those numbers, then it is up to that employer to decide whether they need to investigate who/what is behind those numbers. After many years on Facebook I have only 113 "friends" because it is very hard to become my "friend." I ignore way more friend requests than I accept. That is because I view the program as a way to stay connected with people to whom I want to be connected (family, friends, colleagues). If I have 500 or 1000 or more "friends," seeing what is posted by those about whom I care is pretty much impossible. Personally I think the whole game of thinking that many "friends" or "followers" means something about your own importance is silly at best.

Thank you for exposing this scam

Well, nice to point out the extent of fake accounts on social media to hopefully drive down compensation based on fake social media targets.

In a room of 50 adults, perhaps 25 are on FB, perhaps 5 are on Instagram and perhaps 1 is on Twitter. The vast majority of accounts on Twitter not tied to a famous person are bots.

The chart titled "A Close Look at Martha Lane Fox’s Followers" appears intriguing, but the labels seem inadequate. I assume that the vertical axis label "Join date" refers to the date on which each account was created on the Twitter platform. Does horizontal position indicate that an account began following Martha Lane Fox on a day when she had a particular number of followers? If so, why do the points shift to the left when her follower count dropped? Is that some kind of retroactive correction? Also, what is the significance of the vertically striped voids? Do these indicate that so many bots began following that the follower count jumped dramatically?

This isn't anything new. 60 Minutes aired an episode back in March of 2017 talking about how quickly it was possible for "Fake News" to spread with the click of a button. To re-tweet a message would require an account anyway, so it's perfectly conceivable that these fake accounts provided an affordance to increase Twitter followers. There would numerous overlapping accounts for each Twitter user. In other words, 100 celebrities could all be sharing the same fake user. Scale that to 1,000, 5,000, or 50,000 fake accounts and it's easy to see how you can buy these accounts to boost your influence with little to no effort.

The senators should also ask the FTC to investigate the aggressive demand by employers and megacorporations for lichen followers that helps fuel the Denuvos—excuse me, Devumis[1]—of the internet in the first place. For every celeb caught with fake followers, there are doubtless thousands of non-wealthy non-celebs who have gotten fired just for failing (or heroically refusing!) to inflate their overbearing bosses' social media numbers with them. In a country with non-crazy labor laws this wouldn't even be an issue; until we become one of them, blow the whistle! [1] I can't help but confuse the scummy follower mill with the scummy failed DRM malware. Bad habit.