I'm quite curious about this as a dabbling Twitter comedy content producer/dabbling Twitter developer.
Are there any services out there that sell followers which are less distinguishable from a basic bot account? Or to ask a related question, how much work goes into creating the illusion of authenticity? I'm interested in estimating the likelihood of a given user being real.
I don't really know of any "premium" services; it's just a matter of how much effort the creator puts in. I'm sure there's a spectrum, but I'm not sure how to analyze it/control for it or find more "legitimate" ones.
If you're looking to analyze the legitimacy of a Twitter user it would probably be from the content they tweet. Creating unique tweets is really difficult at scale, so most just retweet or pull from some data source. And if they create enough unique original, valuable content, well https://xkcd.com/810/. Watching people argue with Markov chain generators, incidentally, is one of my favorite things in the world.
There are quite a few services that attempt to determine what percentage of an account's followers are legitimate, but I'm not sure how they do it; probably each a different way.
As an aside, I did watch someone sell a famous author 100,000 twitter followers for $15,000, only to turn around and buy those followers for $100 and take his family to Disneyland.
I think it's silly that people downvoted me for being curious about a controversial topic. I would never pay for followers because the point is actual audience, not the perception of one. I'm interested in it because social networks interest me, and so does the problem of validation of users on social networks.
Are there any services out there that sell followers which are less distinguishable from a basic bot account? Or to ask a related question, how much work goes into creating the illusion of authenticity? I'm interested in estimating the likelihood of a given user being real.