The San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s current cover story is about the culture surrounding Twitter bots that artificially inflate your follower count: who buys them, why, and where you can buy them yourself.

The story’s author, Caitlin Donohue, picked up a few thousand profane, banal nonhuman followers for $26, a process she describes as “like an Internet boob job,” and which seemed to send positive ripples into her real life.

Apparently, once the issue came out, Twitter did away with Donohue’s virtual acolytes. Alas.