In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?” I asked. We’d both added tens of thousands of apparent fans over the previous year or so.
Foddy, an unpresuming Australian with a doctorate in moral philosophy who now makes video games that purposely abuse their players, encouraged me not to get too chuffed about my entourage. We’d both been added to a list of accounts that are recommended to new Twitter users during the sign-up process, he explained. Many of our new followers were fake, created for the purposes of spam or resale. They had followed us automatically.
The report exposes Twitter as willfully duplicitous to users, advertisers, and investors—revelations that could (and should) harm the company’s value and reputation. But it also takes for granted that “real” followers are valid and valuable. The problem with Twitter—and with social media in general—isn’t that influence can be faked. It’s that it is seen to have so much significance in the first place.