Falling Into A Trap

While reading through posts of people I follow on Twitter, I saw this

16 Friends Unfollowed me on Twitter, find out yours http://is.gd/tf0ll1 

shortly thereafter, I saw this

Find out how many People unfollowed you on Twitter http://is.gd/tf0ll1

I decided to have a look at this link myself, without risking my account's security and I discovered that this link goes to  itweetfollowers.info which is registered anonymously through WhoIsGuard, as is their server tweet-stats.info and they are both traceable to a US location, so this is not some foreign-based scam, but something domestic. A trace of their IP shows that they are based in Piscataway, NJ.

Here's a screenshot of itweetfollowers

The reason it's very scammy comes from the fact that I personally saw literally dozens of people through whose Twitter accounts the two above messages were posted. It is simply impossible for all of those people to have been unfollowed by exactly 16 of their "friends" (or actually "followers", in the case of Twitter). The odds against such a coincidence are beyond the most advanced mathematics.

I don't have that many followers on Twitter and I am under no delusion that all or even most of them even read my posts. However, too many people seem to get their underwear in a twist up their butts when they see the number of their Twitter followers decline, even slightly. This kind of insecurity is what leads to people falling for traps like ITweetFollowers as well as those scams where people are offered an app that will tell them who is looking at their Facebook or Myspace page, when the fact is that such apps do not exist and would be impossible to create in the first place. I will grant that some people are just a little bit curious regarding which of their former followers have given-up on them and may even wonder why they made the decision to do this. But, being concern about such minutiae is just a waste of time, when you stop and think about it.

In the end, we should understand that losing a Twitter follower or a Facebook friend is not the end of the world. So you lost a follower. Big fucking deal. Life is too short to worry about bullshit like this.


Duane Browning