All Followers Are Fake Followers

Posted January 30, 2018

External Article: The Atlantic

Ian Bogost, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology wrote The Atlantic, January 30, article “All Followers Are Fake Followers.” The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is part of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Excerpt:

Excerpt:

In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?” I asked. We’d both added tens of thousands of apparent fans over the previous year or so. Foddy, an unpresuming Australian with a doctorate in moral philosophy who now makes video games that purposely abuse their players, encouraged me not to get too chuffed about my entourage. We’d both been added to a list of accounts that are recommended to new Twitter users during the sign-up process, he explained. Many of our new followers were fake, created for the purposes of spam or resale. They had followed us automatically… Ian Bogost is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His latest book is Play Anything.

For the full article, visit The Atlantic website.

 

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Ian Bogost Headshot Photo 2018