Standup and Parks and Recreation writer Joe Mande is trying something new on Twitter: buying a million bot followers from questionable overseas companies. Yahoo has an interview with Mande in which he discusses this new project of his. Here’s a bit from it:
It started with the fact that I had been stuck at 80,400 [followers] for months. And I realized that, at this point the number [of followers] you have on Twitter is the number you’re at. I don’t think a lot of new members are joining, nor do I think they are following as many people as they do when they first sign up. I was just kind of getting bored with the fact that I was stuck at this number.So I read an article a couple of weeks ago saying that for Justin Bieber and Katy Perry and all of these people, over half of their followers are fake. And I was like, “Well, I want in on that.†So I found this shady website that sells Twitter followers, and I was talking to this guy in Moldova in broken English, and I asked him how much it would cost to get to a million, and he said $300. So I said, “Well, I have $300, and a dream. So let’s do this.â€