[matznerd]

These accounts are fakes and the reason they have pictures and tweets is to mask the fact that they are fake. That is obvious, but what for then? Well based on the "following" of the first account from the article, I can see, they are being used by someone who is selling followers. All of those people have over 10k followers and do not look like they merit it.

No one buying followers wants "eggs" which is what they call the default twitter profile pictures. You will actually see people advertise, "no eggs." The pictures and tweets are scraped from other users either randomly or based on keywords to make the profiles look real. It's sucks for the people who get scraped, but that's what's it's like in that world...

[a_bonobo]

Maybe once you got enough "valid" users together you can make any topic trend on Twitter by having all the bots tweet about the topic? Might be a one-shot goldmine.