ESPN's Britt McHenry is Not Nice....

[Tonya Harding likes this]

 

If I were Northwestern I’d tell her to stop referencing that she went to school there.

 

Prior boastful tweets like this are rather amusing now knowing that 92 percent of her followers were fake:

 

The fake Twitter followers thing...

So, a few years ago, there was a guy on Twitter who said he was a big-time photographer. His name was Lucky something or other. He had thousands of followers, so I was like, Well, I guess he's somebody. He turned out to be a first-rate twat. I decided to do a little Interneting, and found that most of his followers were Russian bots. So I made some jibe at him about his fake followers, because I'm petty and mean, and he admitted that they were cheap and easy and worked to give you a rep, at least at first glance. And then, without my permission and without my doing anything, he bought me thousands of fake followers, to show how easy it was, I guess. Like, 10,000 followers for $6 or whatever. I freaked, because I was like, Today's the day someone's going to check my followers for a story like this. He took them down later that same day. But for a few hours, my follower count had ballooned.

Anyway, I'm not saying Britt didn't buy her followers. But it is, somewhat shockingly, at least to a Luddite like me, also possible to buy followers for other people. You can cram someone's account with fake followers no problem.

The bots issue might be what kills social media in the end. It's all so fucking phony.

 

whereas measuring ourselves by real Twitter followers is legit and edifying.

 

Everyone knows the measure of a man is Super Bowl losses.

 

No, son, LACK of super bowl losses.

 

I don't just mean the follower counts (although all else being equal, I'd rather they be real). I mean the Russian trolls and everything else. It's like a terrible kind of virus has infected the operation.

 

all things being equal, I think twitter itself is a virulent operation. I'm glad people game the system with fake followers; the platform is a cesspool, so it makes perfect sense.

 

Britt apparently had a change of heart and deleted her tweets from last night, which is such a shame.

 

You sound like the Joker here. I don't think it was a cesspool at first. Years ago, I found it a useful way to find stories and connect with people I might not otherwise have the chance to know.

Now it's a cesspool, and I think the phoniness of it is a huge reason why.

 

Burn it all down!

Yeah, I quit Twitter last April and I don't miss it a lick. For curated content, I will go to The Week, RealClear and even The Big Lead in its round-up sections each day. I'd rather miss a story here or there than to wade through sludge to maybe, possibly unearth some nugget.