I would not be so vain as to imagine that my contributions to the “gaming Twitter followers” debate, nor the post they prompted by Will Heaven at the Telegraph, had anything to do with Econsultancy’s announcement yesterday that it was unfollowing the impressive 19,000 people its @econsultancy account had followed.

But I am going to chip in. Because, Chris Lake, merely unfollowing the 19,000 people your script followed for you isn’t good enough. And nor are the seeming half-truths and curious definitions in your blog post.

Let’s start with the claim that you were “experimenting” with Twitter when you employed an autofollow script. Were you young and naive in the ways of Twitter? Did you just want to see what would happen? Hmm. Smacks of the same kind of bullshit that @Mazi told the Telegraph:

Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags such as #Iranelection which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”

It didn’t wash when he said it, because he was deliberately misleading about his following methods. (Though he doesn’t explicitly state that he only follows manually, that’s what he means to imply.) And it doesn’t wash in your post, either.

It looks spammy to have 19,000 followers and to follow 19,000 people, but we don’t used Hummingbird or any pyramid software tools to grow our follower count. Our Twitter presence has grown organically.

“Looks” spammy? Sure does. You clearly used an autofollow script (which you admit earlier in the post), which suggests that you intended to artificially inflate your follower count. Even if you didn’t intend that, autofollow scripts do have that effect. Why hide behind this disingenuous and cutesy “we’re curious peeps here at Econsultancy” defence?

I presume by “Our Twitter presence has grown organically”, you mean that it has steadily increased at about the same rate. Well, duh: that’s what happens when you use an autofollow script. That’s not what I, and I’m guessing most other people, mean by “organic”.

“We simply want to start from scratch,” writes Chris. But this isn’t starting from scratch at all, Chris: what you’ve done is dump the a suspicious follower/following ratio, leaving a Twitter account that looks like it has been naturally followed by nearly 17,000 people. Forgive me for thinking that’s not plausible: at a bare minimum, the autofollow script is likely to have inflated that 17,000 by a few thousand. If you don’t understand that, you need to get out of social media.

What’s worrying about Econsultancy’s behaviour here is that not only did they start out with bad practices (I don’t buy their claims about “experimentation”), they’re now prevaricating and have embarked on a course of action that appears to make the offence even graver. Effectively, they’re burying bad behaviour, conveniently assuming (because they have no way of knowing) that their Twitter account has 17,000 natural followers. There’s just no way to tell.

So I’m challenging Chris to really start again by using the following method to clear out @Econsultancy’s follower count too. Why not start from zero on both sides?

I wonder if he’s got the balls to do it.

How to really “start from scratch” without losing your Twitter handle

Let’s assume your current account is called @JohnSmith.

• You’ll need to register a fresh, second account (call it @JohnSmith1) with an alternative email address.
• What you want to do is transfer the name @JohnSmith from the old account to the new one. First, log in to @JohnSmith via the website and change the username to @JohnSmith2.
• Immediately log out and log in to the new account (currently @JohnSmith1) and change the name of that account to @JohnSmith.
• Finally, you’ll want to archive your old account (the one with the gamed follower count), so rename that to something like @OldJohnSmith. That way you can still access your old tweets.

Update: In light of a comment below, I have modified my wording slightly to make it clear that even if it’s true Econsultancy only followed “real” followers back, rather than aggressively pursuing new ones, as I charge @Mazi with doing, my challenge stands. What Chris proposes isn’t “starting from scratch” as I understand the term.