Part of the attraction of Twitter is that it allows you to select which users and information stream you wish to follow to filter out what’s valuable to you from the noise around it.
So pity the likes of Conan O’Brien and Bill Gates who have suddenly found themselves following hundreds of extra people due a Twitter bug. By tweeting ‘accept @username’ that Twitter user would find themselves following you in some form of microblogging mind control (Actually, this is microblogging mind control!). And your new zombie followers will end up seeing your tweets until they unfollow you.
Normally the command is used via SMS to respond to a follower request. The Twitter team is aware of the problem, and while they resolve it, ‘follow count display is set to 0 and follow/unfollow is temporarily offline’.
But although I’m sure it will be resolved quickly, I’m not sure how they’ll be able to reset any dishonest follows without either also catching anyone who was honestly using the SMS command, or leaving a few in place – so you might need to do some Twitter pruning in the next day or so.