Are Dean Esmay and Jack Barnes of A Voice for Men following in the fake footsteps of Superbad’s McLovin?
If you’re on Twitter, and have any number of followers at all, you’re going to end up getting followed by some bots — usually spambots looking for people to pester when certain keywords get used.
But when Twitter accounts have more than a relatively small percentage of fake followers, it’s almost certainly because they went out and bought them in order to make themselves look more influential than they really are.
Well, it looks like two of the most active members of A Voice for Men’s Twitter squad have done just that.
Twitter users @BlutalTheDog and @UnseenPerfidy recently ran “Twitter Audits” of a couple of AVFMers who are especially active on Twitter — AVFM “Managing Editor” @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra, co-host of AVFM’s Blue Collar Red Pill online radio show. The results weren’t pretty:
That’s right: it looks like both of them bought the overwhelming majority of their “followers” — tens of thousands of them in total.
I checked both of their accounts using another fake-Twitter-follower finder on Statuspeople.com, and the results were similarly terrible:
That’s not just embarrassing; it’s sleazy, and a pretty big breach of journalistic ethics for someone (Esmay) who’s the managing editor of an online publication.
By contrast, here’s the Twitter Audit of someone who doesn’t buy Twitter followers.
It will be interesting to see Esmay and Barnes explain this, or if they even try.
UPDATE: Well, Barnes has responded by … blocking me on Twitter. (Esmay already had me blocked.)
Twitter user @AnimalJimmies, meanwhile, has pointed me to two more (apparent) fake-follower buyers, one a GamerGate celebrity, the other AVFM’s “Assistant Managing Editor.”
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we buy Twitter followers to decieve!
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that Mr. C is claiming that evil SJWs are buying fake followers for him in an attempt to make him look bad. Which is, I suppose, possible. But he also claims that he’s got 11,000 or so real followers regardless. Twitter Audit says his real followers only number about 4400.
