Dive summary:
- Buying Twitter followers is more common than you may think, and the prices are cheap. Buy Real Marketing charges $17 for 1,000 and $25 for 25,000.
- The company claims that every user they have is real, but cursory investigation by Fast Company casts doubt on that assertion. The author, Jason Feifer, put various pictures through an image search and the women were often pictured on multiple accounts.
- Fiefer caught up with one such pictured woman, Amanda, who said her picture was from years ago when she was a SUNshine girl, which was a calendar produced by the Toronto Sun. Amanda was unaware that someone was using her likeness. She said, "It's kinda of creepy, to be honest with you. The whole thing."
From the article:
After weeks of trying, I'd nearly found the real person behind a Twitter bot. It wasn't the person who started the bot--chances are, that was just a computer program. Instead, I was hunting for the woman in the profile picture, the person whose identity had been stolen. The Internet is a big place; this isn't easy to do. But I'd tracked the photo of a short-haired, punkish 20-something--used by @Arnitamj5, a bot calling itself Arnita Barayuga--to an abandoned MySpace profile of a Dallas woman named Elizabeth. She didn't seem to have any other Internet presence, but I found one of her old MySpace friends on Facebook, figured out that he worked at a Dallas bike shop, and called it.
