Twitter is home to these semi-people with half-baked identities.  There will be a picture of an Emo guy named “@motivation_quotes” and his blurb says some variation of “I like leadership and self-motivational inquiries. Come and be my friend. Followback 100%”  The English is poor, and the sentiment is cloudy at best.

To find out if my new follower is for real, I go to his profile, where I see that he has tweeted 18 times and has 100,000 followers.  The 18 tweets all concern motivation and leadership.  “What the heck,” I think, “I’ll follow this guy.  He doesn’t seem to be noisy, after all, and he has great influence.”

This was my beginner’s understanding of how to build a network on Twitter.  What I didn’t realize was that his profile does not display how many RETWEETS he has done, which must number in the millions.  Every 5 seconds, another picture of a scantily clad woman originally tweeted by “@True_Romance” or “@Love_Tasty” appears retweeted by @motivational_quotes in my feed.  Once in a while, the bikini is missing due to “oops wardrobe malfunction.”  Some of the tweets are pictures of suicides.

These are the breast robots.  I have a suspicion what they are and why they are retweeting NC-17 obscenities. They represent all that is crass and unpleasant about this new electronic wonderland we have all chosen to inhabit.

Breast robots, as far as I can tell, are part of some murky and shady PR agency based in a not-quite-first-world nation.  They promise 75,000 followers and they do it with this mad babble, artificial identities, and probably a host of other unpleasant tactics that I have yet to discover.

Glory of glories, I discovered the “Mute” feature.  I get to keep following this nitwit and count him among my “followers” and he doesn’t unfollow me, because he doesn’t know I can’t see him.  Or her.

With the help of all the fantastic free features on SocialBro, I can get quick stats on who is following me that I am not following, the reverse, the reciprocal follows, the recent unfollows…so I can clean up my following.

In truth, I think only a half dozen strangers have reached out to me who I would even consider real human beings with shared interests.  I am always helpful to these real people.  I go to their YouTube page and like their video.  I go to their gig on Fiverr and “check it out.”  I don’t befriend any of these strangers on Facebook.  They could suddenly turn into breast robots and then my social network would be tainted.

Only about 5% of my friends are on Twitter.  They are great. We cheer one another on, we retweet, we favorite, and we exchange abbreviated sentences.  All of these friends are female, and oddly they don’t know what I am talking about when I mention the breast robots.  Apparently this only happens to males.  Even males like me who follow a couple of really hot gay porn stars just to keep up with their (ahem) acting careers.

The twitterverse is a massive collection of false identities and robo-posters, with a few real people sprinkled in between.  And, lest I forget, it’s really fun, too!