The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted for the Twitter users out there showing you how to create a "follower-farmer" detection tool that will scan your account for followers that track your account and then soon after unfollow as a means of gaming the follower system.

Are you active on Twitter? If so, do you often wonder why some accounts seem to follow you only to unfollow you moments (or days) later? It’s probably not something you said – they’re just follower farming.

[...] Follower farming is a known social media hack taking advantage of people who “#followback” as soon as someone follows them. [...] In this post, we’ll build an app which lets you log in via Twitter, grabs your followers, and compares the last fetched follower list with a refreshed list in order to identify the new unfollowers and calculate the duration of their follow, potentially auto-identifying the farmers.

They use a Homestead VM and a fresh Laravel installation to create their application. It makes use of the Socialite package to connect to Twitter using your application's client ID and secret. The application then makes use of the guzzlehttp/oauth-subscriber package to connect to the Twitter API and get a list of current followers. The post also includes the code to create a "FollowerServiceProvider" to make it simpler to get the follower information. He then shows how to set up the RestDB account and push the follower content out to it for storage. The tutorial wraps up with the code required to analyze the followers against "unfollowers" and report back the results.