Imaginary cow captures more Twitter followers than congressman after lawsuit

Talk about milking publicity.

An imaginary cow now has more followers on Twitter than the real-life lawmaker who filed a $250 million lawsuit earlier this week that names the parody account as a defendant.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., filed the lawsuit against Twitter and a handful of parody accounts on Monday, alleging the social network silences conservative voices and makes money from "abusive, harmful and defamatory" content. Nunes alleges that two accounts and a political analyst attacked and defamed him and that Twitter ignored his complaints.

One account named in the lawsuit, @DevinCow, which pretended to be the lawmaker's cow, had fewer than 2,000 followers when the lawsuit was filed. But as of Wednesday, the account had ballooned to more than 500,000 followers, surpassing the 396,000 who follow Nunes' account.

The @DevinCow account was apparently created to mock Nunes' upbringing on his family's dairy farm, something he's made central to political identity since he's been in politics . The account tweets a lot of cow jokes and puns to encourage the "moovement."

Nunes' lawsuit alleged that Twitter censored conservative voices through "shadow-banning," the practice of making a post visible only to the person who created it. Twitter didn't respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, but has previously denied suggestions that it suppresses conservative content through shadow banning.

Neither Nunes nor representatives for the @DevinCow account immediately responded to a request for comment.