No, you're right. However, most of those followers are other tea bloggers, tea companies and tea industry people. It's a small community. I'm new to the business, so an 'established' tea blogger posting lies about my company can have a really negative impact.
I see. It does seem that this guy is blatantly an idiot, which hopefully limits his influence... not that being so prevents one from being taken seriously in politics and other realms these days, I suppose. Bringing this extortionary behavior to public attention is exactly the way to go.
The following to follower ratio is a misleading statistic. The number of people you want to see Tweets from vs. the number of people that want to see your Tweets isn't relevant unless you're using Twitter as a publicity platform or are "collecting" followers like you collect Friends on FB/MySpace.
In this case the information is arguably very relevant, but I hope it isn't used generally for all users as it's a biased metric for judgement of quality.
is not exactly a position of great influence.