On Friday, I happened upon this twitter post by my friend Alvin Ashcraft:

alvinashcraft I have 162 fake followers, and you? http://twifakes.heroku.com/

I must’ve been feeling lonely. Because “fake followers” seemed like a really intriguing concept. It reminded me of a tweet written by Scott Hanselman a few days earlier:

shanselman Interesting little tidbit for you. Kevin Smith has 1.6 MILLION followers and tweets a lot. He RT’ed something of mine, and *crickets.*

I thought to myself, “How many of my followers are fake?” I mean, when I user twitter, it almost always feel like I’m taking a really long walk down a super lonely, cricket-laden pier. And, besides, if I could only find out exactly how many of my fake online friends/followers are super-super-fake, I might actually be able to stop Googlbating and peecrastinating, at least for a minute or two.

In my moment of despair and self-loathing, in walk two Brazillian fellows. Meet: Cairo Noleto (@caironoleto) and Cleiton Francisco (@cleitonfco). They created an “open source” twitter application that “counts” the number of fake followers that are fakely following you. It’s called #TwiFakes, and it’s sweeping the fake twitter nation.

So, as I was staring lovingly at my Twitter page, I naively thought to myself, “If it’s good enough for Alvin Ashcraft to retweet about the #TwiFakes phenomenon, then it’s good enough for me to try!” And try I did. And, without my consent (which is of little use to anyone), #TwiFakes went ahead and FarmVilled me right in the face. My newest post, which I did not consent to, looked a lot like Alvin Ashcraft’s, except instead of 162 fakers, I had a measley 12:

evannagle I have 12 fake followers, and you? http://twifakes.heroku.com/

Flash forward a few days. Julie Lerman (@julielerman) falls victim to the same malicious Brazillian antics. Lucky for Julie, she has fewer fake followers than I do (proportionate to the total number), so one of her dedicated followers was kind enough to point her to Adrian Short’s excellent TwiFakes post. In it, Adrian offers the following bit of quasi-conspiratorial (albeit excellent) advice:

You may have seen the website at http://twifakes.heroku.com/ which promises to tell you how many “fake” Twitter followers you have. Do not authorise this website. It tweets without your permission and there’s no telling whether it may do other damage to your account.

Now, here’s the real kicker:

In case you’re wondering, your number of “fake” followers is the number of followers you have divided by twelve. Hardcore algorithm.

And here’s how Cairo and Cleiton plead their case for their so-called algorithmic masterpiece:

In the Holy Bible, Jesus had 12 followers loyal to his cause, but among them was a fake that was the name of this apostle was Judas.

Following this logic, we conclude that every 12 that a person has followers on Twitter, one of them is fake.

Simply calculate the number of followers a person has and divide by 12, this result is the amount of people who are fake.

Flash forward to this very moment in time. Cairo and Cleiton’s devious invention is still sweeping the twitter nation, especially amongst the Portuguese-speaking population. (Interesting sidenote: it seems that black people [who virtually own Twitter] have largely been spared). Though Cairo and Cleiton have removed the non-permissive tweet from their arsenal, their super-simple algorithm is still churning away behind the curtain of shame, and more and more desperate souls are selling their personal privacy for a possible quenching of their ever-increasing hunger for reality.

Aside from the obvious complaints I could make here–complaints that are well-detailed in Adrian’s post–I do believe that Cairo and Cleiton’s spamtastic app sheds some light on a fundamental twitterer’s desire. A desire for fame and self-affirmation, that is. Twitter, after all, is really a vehicle for micro-fame, as it allows non-Jesuses like myself to accrue exponentially more followers than Jesus ever did (to follow me, click here). And, admittedly, there’s something really pleasing about writing a quick fetishized fragment of thought and fantasizing about all the world salivating and retweeting it.

Time to get really, really real, then: Twitter is itself not a valid means of calculating self-worth. One’s “number” of “followers” is more like one’s “number” of “co-fantasizers”, and, sooner or later, we’re all going to wake up and realize that the internet, as social and as complex and as beautiful as it is, can’t really tell us who we are beause it’s way too busy catering to the people that we want to pretend to be. In other words, all of your followers are pretty much fake. No need for division, or frivolous spamming, or crucifixions.

Now, though I’m not a religious fellow by any means, I figure that a quote from Jesus might be in order:

If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my message in these adulterous and sinful days, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he returns in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Or, the tweetable version:

jesuschrist #ff @jesuschrist

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