Actors, models, businesspeople, athletes, adult entertainers, and others have all bought Fake followers from a shadowy company known as Devumi, as the New York Times exhaustively demonstrated in a recent story .

A writer for the Hill, Concha claims that he had purchased followers on the advice of a social media firm, and that he subsequently “deleted” many of the fake accounts.

Busy businessman Michael Dell, another figure named in the article, left his 1.23 million followers in suspense , declining to tweet anything at all over the weekend.

That’s because their conduct lays bare a basic truth of Twitter: On a site where popularity is a question of statistics, fake fame may be less embarrassing than real obscurity.

Uetricht explained that Jacobin’s staff had falsely inflated its reach in the hopes of impressing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when they were attempting to convince the athlete and commentator to write for them.