If you’re impressed by the tens of thousands of followers that “social media guru” who just followed you has amassed, you might want to consider this: up to 30 percent of her followers could be fake.

The “fake followers” epidemic has been a problem on Twitter for some time, but it’s only in the past few weeks that it’s reached epic proportions.
Read more

Last week a little app called Fakers by Status People was launched, allowing anyone to check out how many of their Twitter followers are real and how many are bots, spam or just plain fake.

Business Insider liked the idea of testing for fakers, and took it one step further: they analysed the top companies on Twitter to see which ones were followed by the most fake accounts.

Curious to see which big names in business are all fluff when it comes to Twitter? Read on for the results.
Read more

Think you might be followed by some not-so-legit Twitter accounts? There’s a new app that will tell you how many of your followers are fakes – or bots – and how many are living, breathing people eagerly awaiting your next pearls of wisdom.
Read more

An aide to both Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Republican senator Scott Brown has admitted to creating the @CrazyKhazei Twitter account parodying Brown’s political opponent, including writing a distasteful tweet making fun of the “It Gets Better” project for gay youth.
Read more

In a story we covered in early August, Newt Gingrich was accused of paying for thousands of fake, or dummy, Twitter followers to pump up his perceived influence on Twitter. Gawker got the scoop on the story, which used data to suggest that of Gingrich’s more than 1,325,000 followers, only about 8 to ten percent were real people interested in what he has to say.

Well, Mashable took the story a bit deeper, and did some analysis of their own. And it looks like “fake” followers are plaguing all politicians of a certain type on Twitter, not just Gingrich alone.
Read more

A new batch of fake emails purporting to be from Twitter is making the rounds, trying to get people’s personal details and make money off of surveys. If you’ve received an email from “admin@twitter.com” asking for account verification details, here’s how to tell if you’re being scammed.
Read more

Oh boy. Apparently, some people still haven’t read Twitter’s rules on parody accounts, and it’s getting them into a whole world of legal trouble. The creator of the account @coventryfirst is being sued by life insurance firm Coventry First for sending fake and inappropriate tweets in the company’s name.
Read more