Put up job
A put up job if ever there was.
Bet if you asked him he wouldn't know what twitter was anyway.
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 …
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It must suck having to deal with ass clown circus that is our political system and of course because the US has never seen a country it didn't need to police or nation build (except its own) you do kind of have a dog in the fight. Americans got a slight taste of this with the Greeks being able at times to temporarily gimp our economy (which is why few have any sympathy for Greece having to go through austerity).
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point taken and America's hat Canada unfortunately gets our dandruff as well. And to stir the pot some more basically the only primer you need on the US political system is we really have only two viable political parties and they refuse to do anything ever but spend our money and our grandkids money (each party on different stuff). We have the party of open evil and the party of incompetence. I leave to the reader to figure out which is which.
"the US has never seen a country it didn't need to police or nation build (except its own)"
Oh, that isn't quite true. We do a fair bit of internal nation building of our own all the time, it's just that sometimes we give it a different surname but the given name is always the same, "War on". It doesn't matter if it's a war on blight, smoking, drugs, terrorism, etc.; it always winds up being cast on our backs. Here's one that has been making the rounds lately, "United States v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Mass." Yes, you read that right, the United States is suing(!?) real estate. Why? Here's your answer, it's a motel that rents rooms to almost anyone and helps the police when suspicious activity takes place. Funny thing is if they weren't so helpful the government might not be trying to take the property and stuff the police departments coffers. Don't think that is bad, have a look at the myriad cases in California where the local cops are trying to get the Fed to end run the asset forfeiture because California law is too strict. I won't even get into the Kelo case where the entire area has become a dumping ground because Pfizer pulled out before the town property whores got paid.
I'm not sure either of them could manage a 1955 lemonade stand...
But Mittwitt would be busy trying to bleed the lemonade stand of assets so he could sell the shell and move it to India, while Obama would be trying to keep it going in the winter with a foot of snow on the ground.
Since I can't have wine, I'll sell for a glass of horse piss...
"If there's anyone who is en empty suite follow by empty twitter accounts it would be the current Commander in Chief."
Hey, 10.8 million dead voters in Chicago can't be wrong. (We are talking about a state where, IIRC, something like 4 of the last 7 governors went to prison.)
I worry not only for the fate of America but the rest of the world if Mitt gets elected. The man is a delusional, compulsive liar whose only truly strong, firmly held belief is the power of the upper class, and only the uppermost of them. Like himself.
Also religious nuttery but I won't go into that here, lest it be perceived as hateful.