An earlier post: [webmasterworld.com...] shared that link to the article, but NPR's WNYC interview is new. Thanks!

I missed that one.

Good find.

They have spent the past week cracking down bigtime on purchasing followers. Specifically anything involving political accounts buying followers, but that inherently extends to other accounts who bought followers from the same sources.

the thing is you don't even need to buy followers.
generally speaking if you are very active for a while and make sure you litter your tweets with #keywords then you will find that all kinds of people/accounts use bots that automatically retweet or follow you, also others scan who some users follow and then follow them too.
also in many niches, all kinds of businesses will follow you as long as they find you through a relevant tweet - all because they've read that following lots of people is a good thing or that they'll probably follow you back.

topr8 is right.

And if it's about getting random followers, just to increase your stats, the easier is simply to follow anyone ! I mean, just randomly follow ANYONE, and you'll see that at least 10% of them will follow you back ! So randomly follow 10.000 , you'll get 1000 followers, then you just need to unfollow them. This is stupid , unethical , but not worse than buying followers !

And if it's about getting random followers, just to increase your stats, the easier is simply to follow anyone ! I mean, just randomly follow ANYONE, and you'll see that at least 10% of them will follow you back ! So randomly follow 10.000 , you'll get 1000 followers, then you just need to unfollow them. This is stupid , unethical , but not worse than buying followers !

I have seen a few clearly off topic businesses follow me, they don't get followed in return. Funny thing is that the follower count drops again a day or so later.

The problem that I find is that the number of actual views represents only a fraction of followers. I suspect that many do what I do and follow key lists of tweeters regularly and only pick up the rest if I have time to spare.

The thing is -wrongly- the number of followers / friends / likes, etc, ... are often interpreted by some as a way to measure the popularity of a site / service / etc. Your boss will be pleased if you show that his company has tons of followers. Investors will be pleased too...

Agree. My in-house ad space sales doubled when I mentioned I had 45k followers, even though Twitter has relatively nothing to do with my site.

BTW - none of my followers have been purchased :)

It's again more true with "sponsored tweets" (or other sponsored social network posts). Advertisers are paying based on your number of followers! This is why there is a business around buying / creating followers. One day, advertisers will realize this is a screw, and this bubble will explode too. Same as when advertisers realized that CPM was not a good business model for them. I am old enough to remember when advertisers were paying $10 CPM no matter who was seeing their ads :), this was back to the time advertisers though Internet and TV was the same for advertising.

The thing is, usually, if one wants to randomly follow people, he'll just follow what Twitter is suggesting , which, in a way, is not totally random following, since Twitter is certainly suggesting people more or less related to what you post, or who you follow. So in a way, there can be some "quality" in these random following.

The problem with buying followers, is that most for not saying all these followers are certainly "fake". Automatically generated and may be feed by bots. So one day or another , Twitter can decided to close all these accounts.