Did Mitt Romney really get 117,000 REAL Twitter followers in ONE DAY?
A network of developers and merchants has grown to service the market for fake Twitter followers. Selling bundles of 1,000 fake followers for the typical price of around $18 a day can bring in revenues of $800 per day, according to a study by security researchers at Barracuda Networks. Dealers also have the option of selling re- …
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Put up job
A put up job if ever there was.
Bet if you asked him he wouldn't know what twitter was anyway.
Re: Put up job
The problem is Romney now represents the beast that is GOP. He, or someone on his campaign team, may well have done this, however it could as easily be the actions of one nutjob with a credit card who has just read about buying fake followers on Ebay.
I've got a really bad feeling about this election. A Mormon slash and burn capitalist (from Bain, no less) as leader of the world's most powerful army.
Compare the personalities: Nixon/Goldwater 2012!
Actually, I think Ryan is a fake intellectual, but not as dumb as Palin or Quayle. Nixon/Goldwater 2012 is a great fit for Romney, but something of a stretch for Romney.
Re: Correction
Well people do tend to forget the silent P.
Too many tweets ...
... makes a twat, or so somebody said. Or maybe that should be "too many twitter followers makes a twat"
Re: Correction
"Well people do tend to forget the silent P."
Not if they have to wash their own clothes after the event..
Re: Correction
We also call him Mittwitt, or Mitt the Twit. He should be glad his name isn't MOTT... as in Mott the Twa....
Mittwitt, the man with the plastic personality, and Etch-A-Sketch memory.
Beer, 'cause I need a whole brewery when I think about him and Mini-Mitt
Re: Correction
So why is it Americans go out of their way to pronounce as many words as possible with an 'aa' sound,only to totally remove it from the word 'twat', a word the rest of the English speaking world rhyme with Matt?
I am genuinely curious.
Re: Correction
Based on the British television that I watch, rhymes with rot is about 50/50 commonality as rhymes with rat.
Re: Correction
Twot is used as a non-offensive pre-watershed version.
How utterly pathetic.
The dumbing down of society is well under way.
Others have done it before
Newt Gingrich and Kevin Rudd both have form in this.
"...erodes the overall value of the social network"
hmm... and exactly what "value" is there in knowing when David Beckham has taken a dump?
Re: "...erodes the overall value of the social network"
WHAT??? OMG I need to tweet that.
"Just heard, Beckham bending the brown trout. And to think I almost missed it! lol. #bending_brown, #like_Beckham"
waitaminnit
Obama racks up a hundred thousand or more instantaneously during the start of his presidential campaign and all the Media can do is grovel and scrape telling the world+dog that it's "proof" of the popularity of the "first internet savvy" presidential campaign. No questions asked.
Romney gets similar numbers and all of a sudden, EVERY AP and tech outfit is running an article claiming they're all fakes in the headlines, while running the story with words like "suspect" and "probably" about the accounts, with no actual proof other than "well, it could be*.."
methinks the Media/Entertainment Complex is projecting again. Want to know what the DNC has done, is doing or is planning? See what they're accusing everyone else of doing right now.
The existence of an industry of fake twitter and Mao Brigade accounts DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY EQUAL "Romney's followers are fake", unless it ALSO "proves" Obama's followers are fake as well.
Publishing more allegations without any proof, sounds awfully propaganda-ish to me.
Which planet did you fall off?
It sounds like your mind got an overdose of fair and balanced readjustments. No, there is no proof of Romney purchasing Twitter followers, but the following statement in the original article offers some strong indications: "Four in five of those new [Romney] follower accounts were created less than three months ago and, even more suspiciously, one in four of those accounts (23 per cent) had never sent a single tweet. One in 10 of the accounts have already been suspended by Twitter."
You say: "Publishing more allegations without any proof, sounds awfully propaganda-ish to me."
How do your baseless insinuations of Media/Entertainment Complex / DNC misbehavior improve on this?
I call you a twat, go twit your bile elsewhere.
Re: Which planet did you fall off?
so has any of this investigative integrity EVER been applied to Obama's "popularity?
Or is that a question you're unwilling to deal with?
did you know there are also companies that manage false blog posting accounts for commercial and political causes?
Which one are you working for?
Re: Which planet did you fall off?
Its obvious who you support.......
We really need to get rid of the AC setting to stop so many people who seem to post sensibly posting such rubbish or obvious troll crap just to stir things up.
Note I didn't feel the need to go AC.......
@AC: 15:38
Couldn't be arsed to finish reading the fucking article? Here, try this:
"It is possible for anyone to buy followers for other Twitter users ... Romney’s newest followers could have been paid for by himself, his associates or by his opponents. So far, there is not a feasible way to confirm who is responsible."
Get an account you anonymous pussy.
Re: waitaminnit
From the article:
"Dealers sometimes try to make fake profiles harder to detect by randomly following some famous and some average people, or posting tweets grabbed from the Twitter stream."
Note the "randomly following some famous...people." What would be interesting is the unsaid: if Obama had any fake followers too. If the article's statement is to be assumed true, the accounts may be following one, the other, or both.
Re: Which planet did you fall off?
"We really need to get rid of the AC setting to stop so many people who seem to post sensibly posting such rubbish or obvious troll crap just to stir things up."
Posted by Big_Ted who "didn't feel the need to go AC......."
Re: Which planet did you fall off?
Hungering for Mitt's wit and wisdom? What deprived (should that be 'depraved') lives they lead.
Re: We really need to get rid of the AC setting
no we don't.
the community of commentards can see off the shills and trolls
and, in the context of the article, it would lead to the creation of a load of fake accounts and solve nothing
Re: We really need to get rid of the AC setting
yes we do.
Otherwise why are you arguing with yourself?
Re: We really need to get rid of the AC setting
I'm not, it's you.
See, if it said big_ted up there, while not telling you who I am, it would allow you see which posts were from which user.
Not tricky to understand...
Did Mitt Romney really get 117,000 REAL Twitter followers in ONE DAY?
Why not?
Celeb twitter is rammed full of journo's hoping to get a story without any legwork.
There are probably 117,000 crap journalists in the world, they'll have signed up about the same time.
Seems likey
After all @paigetaylor has loads - hmm best not look as it's definitely NSFW
Two quotes that caught my attention....
"The average dealer controls as many as 150,000 followers at a time"
"Considering there were more than 11,000 abusers identified from only three purchases we made"
So if the average followers is computed from the abusers they discovered then that must mean there are 1.6 billion fake followers on Twitter, which itself claims to have 500 million users. Someone is telling porkies...
Re: Someone is telling porkies...
I think you misunderstood - "dealers" are sellers of fake followers, "abusers" in this context are buyers of fake followers, identified by being followed by the same fake followers that the researchers had bought.
Re: Someone is telling porkies...
That's my reading error. I should have noticed:
"Barracuda discovered 20 dealers..."
The 2000 limit
Twitter's first cutoff limit is 2000 followers - ie you can only follow 2000 people. If you want to follow more, you need to have 2000 people follow you first.
There used to be limits at 4000 and higher as well but I don't think they are in place any more.
This is a fairly well-known trick, it's why only numpties go by follower numbers (on any platform) and instead go for the a-bit-more-trustworthy metric of engagement or even sales/ROI.
Not to give them a hint or anything...
But if you have 20,000 bots and they each use 10% of their follows to follow each other, the problem is sorted.
HMMMM
Given the fact that many of the people that are looking to Romney have at best only heard of twitter peripherally there is the third possibility that many of them signed up when they were asked to at a rally or some other such place I myself only signed on to twitter to follow a few celebrity chefs and an artist I like and have only tweeted 3 or 4 times in the couple of years that I have been signed up. are there fakes out there yup did Romney and Obama get some who knows they can't be certain, so saying that they did without being able to show definitively is irresponsible at best.
your post is a perfect example of what's wrong
Your post is a shining example of why politics is broken. It's obvious from your post that you pretty much believe only people who are already behind a candidate would want to listen to what they say. Personally I believe in having an open mind and listening to what everybody says rather than closing myself off from them.
Re: your post is a perfect example of what's wrong
Ah! So young and idealistic!
We already know what they think, who is funding them and where their allegiances lie.
Rule #1: If you don't hold the purse strings, you don't have control.
What's the point?
What's the point of having a million 'followers' if none of them are real? Isn't one of the basic ideas of Twitter supposed to be that you send out information to people who are interested in what you have to say? Then why buy a list of people who aren't actually people but fake accounts who will therefore never read your tweets? You might as well be delivering newspapers to empty houses. I don't get it.
Re: What's the point?
Instead of thinking of how it directly benefits the candidates, think of how it benefits the people they giving money to make ads. Something like getting a certain amount of $$ per view, and that being able to increase the ammount of people you sent the ad to equating to getting more money from a candidate. Wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for someone to pay to signup a bunch of followers prior to an ad campaign inexpensively and then be able to charge more because of the increase number of "people" who were sent the ad.
I've never been a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen but I have to say his latest creation, this Mitt Romney fella, is the funniest thing I've seen this year.
The Hidden Hand
Slightly off topic, but I've suspected (and not the first) that fake twitter profiles were used to great effect in Lybia, Egypt and now Syria
Re: The Hidden Hand
Sorry but that makes no sense except from the government angle, ie the government try to make it look like masses of people are following what they say as they support them.
From the opposite side false following are a waste as you are calling on no one to meet and demonstrate as you might turn up with very few others and be easy to round up.
So thats how to get an account deleted
Now if only you could do the same with Facebook.....
Is this the same Mitt Romney, who claimed there were security concerns about the London Olympics and that the British people weren't supporting it.... he got bitch slapped be Boris and Cameron, oh and then we had one of the greatest olympics of all time.
Perhaps he just absorbed the followers of @Ireallyshouldnotopenmymouthinpublic
Proudly announcing 30 followers!
I tweet reluctantly, to maintain my name, and I've felt badly over the fact that I have so few followers. Now, I see, it is the badge of authenticity. The few, the proud.
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