The 'Accept' Bug Reveals the Top 20 Twitter Users

The Twitter “accept” bug made quite a splash a couple of days ago, as it enabled Twitter users to follow anyone on the site. What’s more, the exploit was so simple and obvious that virtually anyone could do it. And plenty of people did, at one point, more than 6,000 people were trying to exploit the bug, according to Row Feeder. But the bug also provided the answer to a simple and otherwise impossible-to-solve question, who would you want to be followed by the most?

“People jumped to gain the following of their favorite celebrity, Perez Hilton tweeted out the story to his followers, and the Twitterverse exploded with discussion of the bug. Our nature is to start tracking twitter stories with RowFeeder and crunching the data,” a post on Row Feeder’s blog read.

“Celebrities were the most sought after followers, with Oprah taking the crown and 3 of the Jonas brothers in the top 20. Apparently wealth and power also matter. Bill Gates was #7 on the list and President Barack Obama made the top 20 at #13,” the post revealed.

Oprah, who has over 3,5 million followers, came to everyone’s mind and most people added themselves to her “following” list. Lady Gaga came in second place, even though she has close to four million followers. Maybe the fact that she is already following 151,019 people had something to do with it.

A ‘who’s who’ of popular Twitter celebs followed, and only at seventh place do we find someone outside that circle, Microsoft founder Bill Gates. One of the richest men in the world and one of Twitter’s recent adopters, he was an obvious target for those curious about the bug.

It should be noted that not that many people actually used the bug, when taking into account the fact that Twitter has well over 100 million users worldwide. In the end, no harm has been done, but it has served as a reminder that, while it looks like things are improving, Twitter still doesn’t have the best security policies out there.