Hi. Umm….I’m John. You might know me, you might not. It’s probably not important for you to know me. What is important is that BP knows me, and from time to time we chat about things. Yesterday, he mentioned that it appeared something fishy was going on with the @mighty1090 Twitter account. He wasn’t sure, so I decided to investigate a bit.

[editor’s note: BP here, I want to make it clear that I don’t have any beef with anybody over at 1090AM, other than Hacksaw, who should’ve been fired decades ago. However, what you’re about to read is rather damning evidence against a station going through a major re-branding process as “San Diego’s Sports Leader.”]

TWELVE THOUSAND FOLLOWERS in a matter of days with 3 tweets and just 2 follows. One of those tweets got a whole 4 retweets. Unless @Mighty1090 is Justin Bieber, that just doesn’t seem possible. I wonder who they’re following?

Hmm. That’s odd. You’d think they’d also be following Hacksaw, Marty, Darren, Coach, etc. Maybe their 3 tweets will give us some more clues about who is running this wildly successful twitter account.

Scott and BR are back. There’s a new website with Scott’s backstage videos (I don’t even want to know…). Scott and BR are having an event. I’m starting to sense a pattern here.

I noticed something else weird. Despite the fact that XX1090 is now Mighty 1090, as BP documented with their shaky start, the old @XX1090 twitter account still exists (and @Mighty1090 doesn’t follow it).

See? That’s more normal. Lots of tweets, not an insane amount of followers, and very few tweets hyping up the Scott and BR Show. That is not suspicious. The fact that there’s an @XX1090 account without there actually being a “XX1090” anymore is a little suspicious, but besides that, it’s fine.

So, what happened here? Well, the answer is found by digging through the 12,000 or so followers of the @Mighty1090 Twitter account.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems a little odd that a bunch of Twitter accounts with usernames that start with “Tracee”, “Tracey”, “Traci” and “Tracie” would all follow the @Mighty1090 account in rapid succession…..unless there was a tweet about women named Tracey (which is the correct spelling, by the way), and I don’t see that anywhere. Also, read some of those bios. Those seem very fake. Is the @Mighty1090 account buying fake followers? Let’s keep looking…

A whole bunch of accounts with gibberish usernames and no bio? Okay, I’m ready….

HEY, EVERYONE! THIS GUY’S A GREAT BIG PHONY! The @Mighty1090 account is buying fake followers to make their numbers look good.

I need more proof, you say? Well, let me introduce you to Status People and their Fakers tool. This tool is meant to identify fake (and inactive) accounts to see how much of your Twitter audience is actually, you know, real and alive. First, a couple of examples.

@BFTB_Chargers is the account that I run for BoltsFromTheBlue.com. We write about the San Diego Chargers, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Hmmm, the @Chargers score isn’t that great. Under 40% Good Followers probably means that you’re doing something wrong, but they also don’t have a ton of fake accounts. Good enough, I suppose.

10% Fake for the “old” account for 1090. Not exactly BFTB territory (*straightening tie*), but not too shabby. Seems like you’re going to get some fake followers no matter what you do, but the percentage usually indicates if your followers came organically or if they were purchased.

I wonder how some of our favorite 1090AM personalities do with fake followers?

Darren Smith almost exactly matches the numbers for @XX1090’s Twitter account. That figures.

Yup, that checks out. Now, let’s get to the million dollar question. How does @LobShots check out? That’s only fair since I’m here on this site dissecting everybody else’s twitter account. Also, I guess we can see how this new suspicious @Mighty1090 account looks too. That is what I came here for, right? To investigate?

WOOF. 88% Fake? 6% Good?

Look, LobShots deserves to be commended for one of the coolest rises I’ve ever seen on Twitter. BP took no prisoners and no shortcuts to get where he is on Twitter, and he doesn’t seem like he’s slowing down. The fact that he has 3.3K followers and @Mighty1090 has 12K is insulting. It’s cheating. It makes BP (and myself, and Marty and Darren) look bad.

The fact that the person running the account has only used it as a promotional tool for Scott and BR is a slap in the face to the rest of the talent at 1090AM. It leads me to believe that it’s Scott, BR, or someone else associated with the show running the account. Let me state that again. Scott Kaplan, Billy Ray Smith, or someone else associated with their show that was taken off the air 10 months ago before being brought back last week is running the twitter account for the entire station and ignoring the rest of the shows/talent on that station.

I’m not one to take Twitter too seriously. It’s a place I go to mostly vent and tell jokes. That being said, whatever games 1090AM is playing with this new account are shameful and potentially dangerous to the future of the station. Maybe somebody should look into that.

-John