You can buy Twitter followers — a penny apiece.

It's easy!

"There’s a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number" of followers, and real readers might become interested in you because you've got all those followers. But the cachet depends on people believing that the followers are real people who chose to follow you.

There's a tool, Fake Follower Check, that purports to be able to tell what percentage of a Twitter-writer's followers are fake. It says:

... 71 percent of Lady Gaga’s nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama’s nearly 19 million followers.

But Twitter is starting to clamp down. In April, it filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers....

A court is supposed to save them?