Stephen Fry nears one million Twitter followers

Stephen Fry who almost quit Twitter last month  is about to exceed one million followers. He needs only about 9000 more to blast through the Twitter sound barrier into the realm of the extraordinarily well followed. The average number of followers is 126

In so doing he’s moved ahead of Sarah Brown, currently on 941K who briefly overtook him in October prior to the Labour party conference.

A million followers still won’t make him the UK’s most followed celebrity however, that position is (probably) still held by Lilly Allen with 1.7m, though unlike Fry, she did walk away from too many unkind comments on September 28th with the words “I am a neo-luddite, goodbye”.

Katie Price (436K) took a more combative approach to her detractors last week saying “come on haters attack me! your right, im always wrong im hated i never do anything right do i sorry for that!! xx”

’80′s pop star turned social media networker MC Hammer (1.6m) on the other hand takes a zero tolerance approach to negativity on his account, “If you’re negative, I block you” he says.

Social media brings with it the inevitable ’trolls’ and ‘flamers’ throwing bile from anonymity for kicks and this category of anti social media behaviour needs to be well moderated.

In the Twitter rules, they state “user abuse is not tolerated on Twitter.com, and will result in permanent suspension.” This is a clear enough statement of intent but technically they are still playing catch up.

Celebrities may think abuse is part of the price of fame but on Twitter, it really should be unnecessary.