phantom notification 

When a popular social media app clearly indicates that you have an unread notification, only to reveal there are no new notifications. The only people affected by this are people that never get mentions or RTs, because important people always have hundreds of unread messages at any given time. The Phantom message is a technique the service uses to make you feel popular, even though nobody reads your lame-ass tweets.

Tim: My twizzler is blowing up. Never mind, just another phantom notification.

phantom notification by bkn June 13, 2014