In modern Russian, quite a few words have appeared that came from abroad. Even "advanced" grandparents find it difficult to understand young people who speak a completely different slang with new speech constructions.
Not only have many different gadgets appeared, which each have their own name, but also with this technique came new opportunities that people could not even dream of at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, that it will be possible to contact loved ones both in the forest and at sea, the ability to call them. Who could have imagined that they could make video calls? The young generation, brought up at completely different speeds, can no longer imagine their existence without the Internet. Together with him, people got the opportunity not only to quickly exchange data, but also to make virtual communication, to establish contacts in different countries of the world, as if acquaintance was taking place “here and now”.
Social web
The first popular social networks in Russia were in English. By coincidence, Twitter, which slowly and painfully conquered the Russian public, became the beginning of "sociomania." It was on Twitter, which was subsequently so famously overtaken by the sites VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, that a special language was born - all Twitter users joined Twitter slang.
Even now, when Twitter was translated into Russian and the word follower was replaced by the familiar “read”, many people still say “follower”.
The word “follower” used there was read by the Russian speakers as “follower”, and so it came into use.
Follower is a borrowed word, it came from the English language and has such Russian-language synonyms as "reader", "follower", "subscriber".
The literal translation is "follower." On Twitter slang, this is the name of a social network member who subscribes to another member in order to be able to read updates to his account. An example of the use of the word: “if you like a person on Twitter, you can become his follower”, which means: “if you like a person on Twitter, you can subscribe to his news and events, become his reader”.
A follower can view the public messages of the person he subscribed to in his event feed.
Russified borrowing
Also in Russian the word "follower" is modified, for example, there is a verb "follow". Example Usage: "Fans love to follow their favorite artists on Twitter," which means "fans love to follow their favorite artists on Twitter."
It is noteworthy that social networks, which appeared immediately in Russian, did not take this word, although the first years had many linguistic borrowings in their arsenal. For example, “account”, “like”, etc. have become firmly established in slang.