A Dirty way to the Social Media Stardom

Twitter has somehow created a class hierarchy with its verified accounts. Anyone can receive a "blue tick" as long as they have met a certain criteria. Doesn't it sound fancy to have 10K followers when you just follow no one except the God? That is what these unethical/fake Twitter stars are doing by exploiting a flow in Twitter's workflow.

First, you will receive a follow from a star/verified account from some motivational speaker, influencer, marketer, leader, or a king of jungle jiggy bamboo. You follow them back because you are a nice person who follow everyone else back (probably with an exception of obvious bots), or because you feel happy to be followed by a "star-Tweep".

One week passes by. By this time, the star-Tweep would have unfollowed you already. You would not notice, as Twitter does not inform or alert you on unfollowers. On the other hand, the star-Tweep, this is how he/she became the star in the first place. You will still receive their noise in your time line. This is scam also common in YouTube. Not possible in Facebook or LinkedIn, as there the connection option is two-way, unlike the Twitter and YouTube follow. It might be the case with Google+ too. But I never used it long enough to know its tricks. I am not sure about other social media (such as Instagram), as I am not a user.

I use TweepsMap these days to find these culprits. Trust me, every week I have around 5 of these guys. Those with "10 K followers and 5 K following", following me first only to unfollow me within a week after I followed them back.

The last offender was someone (a company, judging from their handle) with "Following: 4,975, Followers: 7.8K", who followed me first to unfollow me within a week after I followed back.

Bye for now, Twitter. You used to be a way to announce "eating salad now", and you have grown up to be a mass weapon for marketing, politics, and all the similar things.