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How to Buy Twitter Followers

AS a comedian, Dan Nainan was blessed with fans, millions of YouTube views and, once, an audience with President Obama. But one thing was missing.

“The number of Twitter followers I had in relation to how many people in the world know about me was woefully inadequate,” he said. So in June he bought a small city's worth for $424.15, raising his Twitter follower count from about 700 to more than 220,000.

“There's a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number,” said Mr. Nainan, 31, adding later, “When people see that you have that many followers, they're like: ‘Oh, my goodness, this guy is popular. I might want to book him.' ”

It may be the worst-kept secret in the Twittersphere. That friend who brags about having 1,000, even 100,000 Twitter followers may not have earned them through hard work and social networking; he may have simply bought them on the black market.

And it's not just ego-driven blogger types. Celebrities, politicians, start-ups, aspiring rock stars, reality show hopefuls - anyone who might benefit from having a larger social media footprint - are known to have bought large blocks of Twitter followers.

The practice is surprisingly easy. A Google search for “buy Twitter followers” turns up dozens of Web sites like USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and FanMeNow.com that sell Twitter followers by the thousands (and often Facebook likes and YouTube views). At BuyTwitterFollow.com, for example, users simply enter their Twitter handle and credit card number and, with a few clicks, see the ranks of their followers swell in three to four days.

Will Mitchell, the founder of Clear Presence Media, a marketing company outside Tampa, Fla., said that he has bought more than a million followers for his clients, which include musicians, start-ups and a well-known actress he declined to identify.

“And it's so cheap, too,” he said. In one instance, Mr. Mitchell said, he bought 250,000 for $2,500, or a penny each.

One site, Fiverr, an online classified for cheap marketing services, has several ads offering 1,000 Twitter followers for $5.

Heddi Cundle, founder of MyTab.co, a San Francisco company that helps people raise money for trips, spent $5 on Fiverr to buy 200 followers last October, when her site started. By the next month, “we had about 1,100 to 1,200 people on both Twitter and Facebook, which was amazing,” she said. “We needed that to get ourselves going.”

Fake Twitter followers briefly made the news in July, when Mitt Romney's Twitter following jumped by more than 100,000 in one weekend - a much faster rate than usual. A flurry of news reports purported to expose the practice of buying followers. “Romney Twitter account gets upsurge in fake followers, but from where?” read a headline on the NBC News Technolog blog.” (The Romney campaign has denied it bought followers.) Similar claims were lobbed at Newt Gingrich last year; his campaign also denied that he paid for any of his 1.3 million-strong Twitter following.

Having fake followers, it is important to note, does not necessarily mean that they were purchased. Unlike Facebook friends, Twitter does not require users to approve followers. In other words, anyone can follow you on Twitter, whether it's your mother or a spammer.

Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers - often referred to as “bots.”

Buyers and sellers see nothing wrong with it. “Buying followers generated by bots is against Twitter's terms and frowned upon by the public,” Mr. Mitchell said. “However, it is perfectly legal.” 

The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.

The tool examines Twitter relationships, said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. “Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers,” he said. “We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake.”

If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.

But Twitter is starting to clamp down. In April, it filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers. (The case is pending.) That didn't discourage Mr. Nainan, the comedian. He recently asked about “the theoretical maximum” Twitter followers he can purchase.

“They said, ‘You could probably get over a million, a million and a half,' ” he said. “And I'm like, ‘Why not? I can afford it.' ”



Work at Slaughterhouse Is Halted After Graphic Undercover Videos

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Compassion Over Killing video of slaughterhouse operations

Federal authorities have shut down a California slaughterhouse for investigation after an animal protection charity secretly filmed cows being electrically shocked, shot in the head, suffocated and undergoing other abuses.

The videos were filmed with a hidden camera by an investigator for the charity, Compassion Over Killing, who worked undercover at the Central Valley Meat Company in Hanford, Calif., from June 18 through July 2, the charity said. The investigator worked in the yard, then on the slaughter line, during that period, Erica Meier, the executive director for the charity group, said in an interview.

Raw footage was handed over to United States Department of Agriculture officials last Friday. Its Food Safety and Inspection Service said in a statement this week that it had received “distur bing evidence of inhumane treatment of cattle” at the meat company and suspended the work of inspectors there on Aug. 19, effectively forcing the plant to halt its slaughtering operations.

The U.S.D.A. statement continued:

Based on the videotape, in at least four instances, plant employees are observed excessively prodding cattle with an electric device, pulling their tails, or forcibly attempting to make cattle rise from a recumbent position. All actions are considered egregious humane handling violations or in regulatory noncompliance.

“Our top priority is to ensure the safety of the food Americans feed their families,” said Al Almanza, F.S.I.S. administrator. “We have reviewed the video and determined that, while some of the footage provided shows unacceptable treatment of cattle, it does not show anything that would compromise food safety. Therefore, we have not substantiated a food safety violati on at this time. We are aggressively continuing to investigate the allegations.”

U.S.D.A. food safety regulations state that, if an animal is non-ambulatory disabled at any time prior to slaughter, it must be condemned promptly, humanely euthanized, and properly discarded so that it does not enter the food supply.

While the decision affected companies and government programs, the U.S.D.A. said it did not issue a recall of any meat processed there. The slaughterhouse supplied about 21 million pounds of meat to the National School Lunch Program and other federal food initiatives in the year ending in September. One of its smaller buyers, the hamburger chain, In-N-Out Burger, said it stopped using the company as a supplier.

Mark Taylor, the chief operating officer of In-N-Out Burger, said in an e-mailed statement that the slaughterhouse provided the company with beef in chuck form that it used to make its own patties. Mr. Taylor wrote:

As soon as we became aware of the allegations regarding Central Valley Meat Company and their handling of cattle, we immediately severed our supplier relationship with them. In-N-Out Burger would never condone the inhumane treatment of animals and all of our suppliers must agree to abide by our strict standards for the humane treatment of cattle.

The action was widely followed on Twitter by animal rights organizations and advocates linking to the coverage.

Brian Coelho, the president of Central Valley Meat Company, told The Los Angeles Times that his company was cooperating fully with federal investigators. The meat plant has been in Hanford, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, for 23 years.

Ms. Meier of the animal rights charity said the slaughterhouse was chosen randomly, although such undercover work starts with the expectation that the investigators are going to see cruelty, “We had no prior knowledge of specific violations or suspicions. The facility was hiring and our investigator applied for a job.”



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    • Japanese Journalist\'s Last Report Released After Her Death in Syria

    By ROBERT MACKEY

    Two days after the Japanese journalist Mika Yamamoto was shot and killed in the Syrian city of Aleppo, her news agency released some of the footage she recorded in her final hours.

    The video, posted online with subtitles by Britain's Telegraph, shows that Ms. Yamamoto, 45, was filming Syrian rebel fighters alongside her partner, Kazutaka Sato, when she was shot and killed.

    Video recorded by the Japanese journalist Mika Yamamoto in the Syrian city of Aleppo this week, shortly before she was shot and killed.

    According to a biographical note on the Web site of her agency, The Japan Press, Ms. Yamamoto was an experienced war correspondent who produced a report on the oppression of women in Afghanistan during the Taliban's rule, and later reported on the American-led wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Colleagues told The Japan Times that she was a careful reporter a nd “wasn't a reckless type.”

    Her father, Hiroshi, a retired journalist, told the same newspaper: “She is not a war journalist, but rather a human journalist,” who was determined to “come home alive to tell the real stories of women and children in battlefields.” He added: “She always talked about the miseries of people involved in conflicts, human lives and world peace.” His daughter was “a far better journalist than I was,” Mr. Yamamoto said.

    In another video report published on Wednesday, Mr. Sato recounted his partner's death and said that she had been shot at close range by a Syrian Army gunman.

    Kazutaka Sato, a Japanese journalist, recounted the death of his partner and fellow-reporter, Mika Yamamoto, in Syria this week.

    Ms. Yamamoto's death was announced on Monday, when graphic video of her dead body being transported out of Syria was uploaded to YouTube by supporters of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

    As The Associated Press reported, the clip announcing the reporter's death included a statement from Capt. Ahmed Ghazali, a rebel fighter in Azaz, on the Turkish border, who said: “We welcome any journalist who wants to enter Syria.” He added: “We will secure their entry, but we are not responsible for the brutality of Assad's forces against the media.”

    Activists also recorded far more graphic and distressing video of Mr. Sato weeping as looked at his partner's bloody and bullet-scarred body in a field hospital. According to The A.P., Mr. Sato said, as pressed his cheek against hers in that video, “Why? You are wearing a flak jacket.” Looking at the grave wounds to her head and arm, he added: “That must hurt. Did you suffer?”



    Tweet It Maybe

    For decades, the song of the summer would emerge each year following a pattern as predictable as the beach tides.

    Pop radio would get it rolling before school let out, and soon the song - inevitably one with a big, playful beat and an irresistible hook - would blare from car stereos everywhere. Then came prom singalongs as the song finally became ubiquitous around the Fourth of July. In 1987, it was Whitney Houston's “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” In 2003, Beyoncé's “Crazy in Love.”

    But the success of this summer's hit, Carly Rae Jepsen's cheerfully flirty “Call Me Maybe,” shows how much the hitmaking machine, as well as the music industry itself, has been upended by social media.

    Only a year ago, the charts were dominated by stars who had come out of the old machine of radio and major-label promotion: Katy Perry, Rihanna, Adele, Maroon 5. This year's biggest hits - “Call Me Maybe,” Gotye's “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Fun.'s “We Are Young” - started in left field and were helped along by YouTube and Twitter before coming to the mainstream media.

    A tribute version even brought the song to the attention of President Obama. In an interview with KOB-FM, a New Mexico radio station, he said: “I have to admit, I've never actually heard the original version of the song. I saw this version where they spliced up me from a whole bunch of different speeches that I made. They kind of mashed together an Obama version of it.”

    Nearly two-thirds of teenagers listen to music on YouTube, more than any other medium, Nielsen said last week. Ms. Jepsen said in a recent interview that “the viral videos are what's been the driving force for this. It was insane to see that the music could spread that far because of the Internet. It's a cool thing. It changes the game completely.”

    YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are now record labels' textbook tools for starting a marketing campaign, and if the numbers there are big enough, they can be used in pitches to radio and television programmers.

    To introduce Cher Lloyd, a 19-year-old singer who was on “The X Factor” in Britain, Epic Records set up a “queen” fan to beat the drum on Twitter, and coached Ms. Lloyd on what to mention online - a TV appearance, for example, or the Twitter handles for radio D.J.'s.

    “In this day and age, artist development is about how do you turn 10 Facebook likes into 100, into 1,000,” said Scott Seviour, Epic's senior vice president for marketing.

    The song catapulted Ms. Jepsen, apple-cheeked and giggly at 26, from obscurity to worldwide fame. Five years ago she placed third on “Canadian Idol,” and last fall she released “Call Me Maybe” in Canada to preview her second album. By the Christmas holiday it was a minor hit in Canada, when Mr. Bieber heard it.

    “It's supposed to be a fun song,” Ms. Jepsen said. “Not to take yourself too seriously, to put you in a good mood.”

    Mr. Bieber's role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media and old-fashioned celebrity promotion. On Dec. 30, 2011, he told his 15 million Twitter followers that “Call Me Maybe” was “possibly the catchiest song I've ever heard lol.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mr. Braun signed Ms. Jepsen to their label in the United States, Schoolboy, which is affiliated with Interscope Records and the Universal Music Group.

    To exploit the success of the single, which has sold eight million downloads around the world, Ms. Jepsen delayed the release of her album. Called “Kiss,” it will now be released next month, when she will also hit the road as an opening act for Mr. Bieber.

    The song's trajectory also demonstrates the continuing power of radio, which record executives say is still essential to turn any song - no matter how much online buzz it has - into a genuine smash.

    In March and April, when “Call Me Maybe” was getting tens of millions of views on YouTube, it still had relatively low radio play - fewer than 5,000 spins a week on Top 40 stations in the United States, according to Nielsen. It hit No. 1 on iTunes on May 27, but took almost a month to reach No. 1 on Billboard's singles chart, which counts sales as well as airplay and streaming services. By then it had about 20,000 spins a week on multiple radio formats.

    “There's not a million-seller out there that doesn't have radio play,” said Jay Frank, chief executive of the label DigSin. “But its first million generally doesn't come from radio.”

    “Call Me Maybe” is a watershed case for the use of social media as a marketing tool, but the song's success will be difficult to replicate - even for Ms. Jepsen as she prepares to release her album. No matter how hard a record company might push, popularity online depends on the enthusiasm of individual fans.

    The marketers behind Ms. Jepsen have worked to organize it to some degree, through tools like a Tumblr blog collecting fan tribute videos. But Jonathan Simkin, her manager, said that trying to control the energy wasn't the point.

    “That's part of the beauty of how this has grown,” Mr. Simkin said. “This is just people who the song struck. I don't want to harness it or limit it. I just want to pinch myself and say, ‘Thank God the song affects people this way.' ”

    Ms. Jepsen said she was not worrying about trying to line up another megahit, because that kind of success is never predictable.

    “I never know what is a hit and what isn't a hit,” she said. “I just write what feels natural and good. At end of the day you just release it and hope for the best.”



    United States Grants Broad Sanctions Exemption for Iran Quake Aid

    By RICK GLADSTONE

    The United States cleared the way on Tuesday for American charities to expedite relief to the victims of the double earthquake that struck Iran more than two weeks ago, issuing the charities a temporary but broad exemption to the regimen of economic sanctions imposed on that country over its disputed nuclear energy program.

    The exemption, announced by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees the sanctions, authorizes charities “to collect funds to be used in direct support of humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities in response to the earthquake.” The exemption, which expires on Oct. 5, permits the charities to transfer up to $300,000 each to relief and rebuilding efforts, bypassing the restrictions on financial transactions that are enforced under the sanctions.

    Advocacy groups in the United States had been pressing for such an exemption, arguing that it was necessary in order to secure the cooperation of banks and other financial institutions. Many have been reluctant to engage in money transfers to Iran for fear of violating the sanctions rules.

    “This humanitarian gesture will empower the American people to help Iranians who've lost everything to this terrible natural disaster,” David Elliot, assistant policy director at the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based group that represents Americans of Iranian descent, said on the group's Web site. “The White House should be commended for ensuring that emergency relief efforts won't be held hostage to the bad relations between the two countries.”

    The Bush administration issued a similar exemption, known as a general license, for charities who aided victims of the earthquake in Iran's southern city of Bam on 2003, which left 25,000 people dead.

    More than 300 people were killed and thousands left homeless in the pair of Aug. 11 quakes, which struck a Turk ish-speaking area in northern Iran. Senior officials in the Iranian government, which has faced some domestic criticism over its uneven response to the quake, have said they would accept foreign assistance. But the government has declined to accept a direct offer of help from the Obama administration, which characterized that decision as disappointing in a post on the official White House blog by Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser.



    Anti-Islam Ads Remixed in San Francisco and New York

    By ROBERT MACKEY

    As my colleague Benjamin Weiser reported last month, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group by refusing to run an ad that refers to Arabs as “savage” on 318 city buses.

    The ad campaign was devised by Pamela Geller, the crusading anti-Islam blogger who fought to block the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center two summers ago. The full text of the ad, which refers to a statement by Ms. Geller's intellectual hero Ayn Rand, reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” Then, between two Stars of David, the tag line appears: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

    While the judge gave the New York City transit system 30 days to consider its options for appeal, the ads have already appeared on the sides of buses in San F rancisco, provoking anger from Muslims and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

    As the local ABC affiliate in San Francisco reported, the city's Municipal Transportation Agency took the unusual step of denouncing the ads and running huge disclaimers on the sides of the buses to disavow what a spokesman called the “repulsive” message from Ms. Geller's group it was forced to accept.

    Earlier this week, some of the San Francisco ads were edited by Ms. Geller's opponents to invert their message. An image posted on Facebook on Sunday by an Oakland blogger showed that text was added to the side of one bus so that the ad now reads: “In any war between the colonizer and the colonized, support the oppressed. Support the Palestinian right of return. Defeat racism.”

    As Nora Barrows-Friedman reported on the pro-Palestinian Electronic Intifada on Saturday, another ad was changed by superimposing a hand stamping the words “hate speech” over the original text on the side of another bus.

    Ms. Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative has also succeeded in placing similarly themed ads in Metro-North stations in the New York suburbs. As an image of one of those ads posted on Instagram by a Sarah Lawrence College graduate student who blogs as @supertrampnyc shows, it reads: “19,250* deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. *And counting. It's not Islamophobia, it's Islamorealism.”

    Writing on her group's blog last week, Ms. Geller posted a reader's photograph showing that one of those ads, at the Hastings-on-Hudson train station, was torn down leaving only a tiny sliver of paper - on which someone had scrawled: “Countless acts of terrorism and violence have been committed by Christian extremists. Does this make all Christians terrorists?”

    Although Ms. Geller has launched a number of similar initiatives in the past, she noted that a pro-Palestinian ad had been placed in Metro-North stations earlier in the summer. Liliana Segura, an editor at The Nation, posted an image of that ad on Twitter last month.

    Ms. Segura's photograph shows, the ad from the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine illustrated “Palestinian Loss of Land” from 1946 to 2010 through a series of maps. The text next to the illustration said: “4.7 Million Palestinians Are Classified by the U.N. as Refugees.”

    After that ad appeared in stations, a local CBS news reporter spoke to the man who paid it and to the editor of a Jewish newspaper in New York, The Algemei ner. The newspaper editor, Dovid Efune told CBS that the ad was anti-Semitic because “it paints Jews as aggressors, as imperialists - people that are stealing or taking land from others.”

    A CBS news video report on a pro-Palestinian ad in a suburban New York train station in July.

    While the language in the pro-Palestinian ad refrained from attacking any group, the original Ayn Rand statement Ms. Geller adapted her ad copy from is even more inflammatory, as Adam Serwer explained this week in a post on the Mother Jones Web site. During a lecture in 1974, Ms. Rand said:

    The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind-the development of industry in that wasted desert continent-versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.



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