“I would assume doesn’t even know that they’re following those accounts,” says Stephanie Abrams Cartin, the founder and CEO of a New York City-based social media PR agency called Socialfly. Twitter follow lists are technically public, but within the Twitter interface, followers can only be viewed by scrolling through every account: quite a task when you are following several hundred thousand people. Twitter removed that auto-follow feature from its own site in 2009, but the capability stuck around in its API until 2013, allowing many third-party tools to set accounts to “auto-follow” regardless. Twitter once had an “auto-follow” feature that handled this process on behalf of users by automatically following any new followers. The most likely culprit is a piece of Twitter etiquette known as the “follow back.” Some consider it polite to follow your followers, and until recently, only Twitter accounts that followed each other could communicate through direct messages, which added a practical component to the tradition. A spokesperson for Joe Rospars, Obama’s principal digital strategist for both presidential campaigns, said that he was not available to comment. Neither the Organizing for Action campaign nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.
So why is the official Twitter account for the president of the United States publicly following adult movie stars? Of course, American porn stars are just as American (and just as worthy of the President’s ear) as anyone else, but this interaction is nonetheless an unusual move for an elected official’s campaign-managed social media account.