There’s a strange Twitter scam being played on the public by some celebrities.  I’ve seen it 3 times in the last few years.  Only famous people do it, because only they would benefit from it.  I’ll tell you what I personally witnessed.  The first person I saw do this is a well-known pornstar, so let’s just call her that, because I don’t want to use any of these people’s real names.  I’m not trying to make a public splash with this, or get into a personal fight with anyone.  I just want other Twitter users to know this goes on.
So I was following Pornstar because I was a fan of hers before this.  This was when I first started using Twitter all the time, which was only a couple years ago.  Reading her tweets, she often got into fights with people harassing her.  Calling her names,

saying mean things about her, etc.  She spent more time on this problem with complaining and sending tweets that seemed to be fishing for support and getting people to tell her how great she was and how awful these harassers were.  Yet more time was spent interacting with fans who took that bait, building up rapport and a “team up with me against my harassers” kind of community building thing.  And she did, indeed, get a lot of extremely mean tweets and replies to her tweets, full of name calling and disparaging comments.
She seemed really upset about this and I felt sorry for her.  I founded and ran an internet company that did every type of internet service and business that could be done at the time, between 1995-2011.  So I felt that she could be protected from this harassment if she had someone do social media management for her.  I wrote her and gave her my thoughts on this, telling her that if someone would delete all the mean tweets, block all those accounts, and report the harassers to twitter, that in a fairly short time, almost all the people causing her these problems and worries would be gone and she could enjoy social media again.  I then offered to do the job of social media manager for her – for FREE – because I was really bothered by the way she was being treated and how upset it seemed to make her.
Well, that did not work out.  And the reason why it didn’t work out is the scam that’s the point of this article.  It turned out that behind all her crying and complaining about people harassing her, she wanted those people in her feed saying these awful things!  It took me a while to figure this out, and then even longer to get her to finally be honest with me and tell me why she didn’t want me to fix her Twitter harassment problem for her, for free.  But I finally got her to tell me that these people and the whole controversy surrounded them harassing her generated a lot of traffic for her tweets and was good for business.  Needless to say, I was no longer a fan of hers after that.  I despise liars and fakers.
So in the years since then, I have been through this same, exact scenario with two other “celebrities” who were complaining about Twitter harassment and seemed to be hurt by it.  The most recent was over the last week, that’s why I am writing this today.  I volunteered to fix it for them, mostly to have something to do.  And each time I found out that the tears they shed about harassment were crocodile tears.  They want the harassment because it’s good for business and creates public sympathy for them

Maybe it’s hard to believe at first, but on reflection it really isn’t.  These are the same people who tip off paparazzi and grocery line gossip rags to “catch” them doing things out in public to keep their names in front of the public.