New York Times profiles a sleazy Twitter follower-farm, the sleazy serial liar who made millions on it, and the celebs, politicians, sports figures and "influencers" who paid him

[hecep]

@HMSGoose

If you’re pretty sure everyone else is doing it, you’re a fool to start out ten steps behind.

Justification for the whole sleazy process aside, I’d imagine that the “actual Twitter users” would not be sanguine about this.

“Devumi’s wholesale botmasters created followers of varying quality: orders would be filled with a mix of plausible-seeming followers cloned from actualy [sic] Twitter users, with recompressed profile images, and subtly altered usernames (lower-case l’s substituted for i’s, etc)…”