Is Pinterest's forced following in the user's best interests?

In terms of ethics, I don't think it's a big deal.  Nobody's lying, there's no malicious intent. In terms of how good it is for the new user, I think it's net positive - sure, some users are more sensitive and become annoyed that their ex-bf of 10 years just got an email saying XYZ is now following them.  But I think there are a lot more users who yield net positive from this as they can then immediately see the power of their "newsfeed" (homepage) and increases retention after on-boarding. For a class project, I scraped some basic public Pinterest user data on a somewhat randomized sample, and the quitter population on Pinterest is so much smaller than Twitter and Foursquare (using professor's scraped data).       In terms of how good it is for the Pinterest community as a whole, though, one additional ramification of this forced follow is that it dumbs down the value of a follow.  When someone on FB adds me as a friend, I know that person wants to increase our interaction to some extent.  On Twitter, I know that person is at least somewhat interested in my thoughts and what I'm eating for lunch.  On Pinterest, it's hard to tell if someone is organically following me or auto-following me, so I pay little attention to new follows and rarely follow people back - it just feels less human and authentic than other social sites. According to my datasets, Twitter users are much more likely to reciprocate follows than Pinterest users, which means that Twitter is more social of a product at a high level --> network effects.  That said, one could argue if Pinterest REALLY needs to be super social - interesting debate in and of itself.

Yes, Some times pinterest make spam. I have an experience like this. Pinterest sent me some http://www.epinterestfollowers.com/ name to follow. But this same things do twitter.

I find it pretty disturbing. More because of the fact that I've been receiving tons of emails saying "so an so is following you on Pinterest". Now I'm sad that I'm not as popular as I thought I was. Is the information correct in this initial question? Any links available? If so I think it's a cheap trick. But again I need to do more research.

On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is I couldn't care less and 10 is I'm outraged and quitting the site and loudly railing against it wherever I can, this is about a -1. To me, this is roughly the social equivalent of you complimenting someone on my behalf without me knowing to the end of contriving a social connection. Worst case scenario, I find them annoying and want to unfollow them at some point. Best case scenario, they're a little cooler than me and reciprocate by following me back and fill up my feed with things that are enlightening and pleasant. I get that, in principle at least, this is wrong. I just don't think the effects are bad enough to care about and I'm so used to my privacy/identity being exploited by the social sites I use for free (a savvier person would call this a conscious exchange) that this doesn't even register. I have the opposite problem: I'm pretty sure I'm the least cool person on Pinterest. In whatever way Pinterest keeps score, I'm probably the least shared/followed/interesting user on there. At this point I'm a wall flower there and could only benefit from them running around the proverbial 8th grade dance floor and telling all the girls I think they're cute without my permission.