Follow the leader

I was shocked to learn this week that a host of top celebrities - including two heads of state - are seemingly fudging their online popularity numbers.

Australian social media marketing company uSocial.net claims to be a real whizz with Twitter and reckons its got "substantial evidence" that a raft of famous names have been "artificially" increasing their number of followers.

The list of named and shamed slebs includes Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Justin Bieber, Martha Stewart, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears. (And I'd like to point out I definitely know who more than one of those people is.)

More shocking still is that 10 Downing Street - the page of the UK Prime Minister - also stands accused of adding faux followers. I guess it's understandable; massive tax hikes and savage cuts to public services have a nasty habit of making people unpopular.

But you wouldn't catch me doing something so underhand. I swear blind I legitimately earned every single one of the 10,000 loyal followers of my Tweets on cloud computing and Dagenham's medieval churches.