Last weekend, The New York Times opened it up. The paper ran an extensive investigative report about the companies that sell Twitter followers and retweets, and the people who buy them. Many of those people are famous already: The Times story opens with geometrically fractured portraits of the model Kathy Ireland, the athlete Ray Lewis, and the actor John Leguizamo. They are presented like modern mug shots of fraudsters caught in the act.

The report exposes Twitter as willfully duplicitous to users, advertisers, and investors—revelations that could (and should) harm the company’s value and reputation. But it also takes for granted that “real” followers are valid and valuable. The problem with Twitter—and with social media in general—isn’t that influence can be faked. It’s that it is seen to have so much significance in the first place.

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Less than a month after our steak dinner, my fake-follower spigot dried up—a change to the recommendation list, perhaps, or the onboarding process, or who knows what else. Foddy’s did, too, soon after. Our followings leveled off to a depressing plateau, and for the two-and-a-half years since, they have increased slowly, organically, and against the current of Twitter’s occasional deletion of spam accounts. Even so, the phantom following remained ours to keep, a ghost army that continues to bolster our reputations.

Despite the suspicions of Foddy’s colleague, neither he nor I had ever bought any followers. But not for lack of opportunity. Devumi, the main company unmasked in the Times feature, is but one of dozens of businesses that sell followers, likes, and shares on social-network services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. They cost pennies apiece, especially when bought in large quantities.

Indeed, the fake-follower racket has become more sophisticated since my run-in with it in 2015. At that time, new accounts were mostly “eggs”—Twitter’s now-retired default profile picture—attached to randomly generated usernames. In 2017, Twitter started reducing the visibility of such users. This was mostly an effort to curb harassment, since bullies often create new accounts when their targets block or report old ones. But it also forced the forger’s market to up its game. The Times describes some of the successful tactics that followed: copying profile pictures and bios, invisibly altering usernames, and then registering the results as machines to follow and retweet paying customers.

The Times contrasts the celebrities and the hucksters who service them with the innocent, ordinary folks whose profiles are sometimes impersonated to create fake followers. After the fragmented faces of Ireland, Lewis, and Leguizamo, the Times presents an undistorted portrait of a Colorado engineer named Salle Ingle. The page calls her “a victim of social-media identity theft.”