This is what a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like

I will go so far as to say that this is a pervasive problem.  Not the idea of anonymity, but rather this type of abuse of anonymity.   Twitter is the most obvious place to find these kinds of networks of imaginary followers, but it’s far from the only place.  Automated systems can (and have) been built to boost ratings for You Tube videos, dog-pile comment sections, adjust app rankings, you name it, on the internet, there seems to be a bot for it.

The thing is, nobody *really* wants to look closely at those numbers.  Anyone with a million followers on Twitter is not going to be interested in figuring out what percent of those are real and what percent are bots.  The paycheck is in the aggregate, in being able to sell to advertisers or throw your weight around.  So it behooves those bots to follow your lead.  The people who run those networks of bots need them to be valuable enough to not be run off, so they re-tweet, they signal boost, the amplify the signal of whomever they follow.

They don’t think, they don’t have morals, they don’t care, they just copy.  In doing so, they can give a megaphone to a great cause or a sh*tty one.  They can run people entirely off the internet forever, or draw eyeballs to a situation that needs to be discovered.

But in order to determine just how much of that signal-bump is real, you have to dig into it.  Data-mining is the only way to try to figure out where the real influencers are versus the ones that are just digital myna-birds.