

15 percent of Mitt Romney Twitter followers are paid fakes - esolyt
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/mitt-romney-fake-twitter-followers/

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ShabbyDoo
100K in a day seems like sloppy astroturfing. Why not add on smoothly over the
course of weeks? At only $800/thousand followers, perhaps $80K was spent by an
Obama supporter to create a news story and discredit Romney? Perhaps Romney
was the inadvertent target of these astroturfing firms' efforts to make their
fake users seem more legit? I checked out Obama's follower stats, and he
experienced no such bump. Why pick sides if your goal is simply to sell fake
followers random folks?

[I'm not necessarily a fan of either major party candidate, so please don't
consider this a political discussion.]

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andrewfelix
I'm confused, who's picking sides? I just read an article about twitter
followers based on observable statistics. Why are you talking about
hypothetical astroturfing, and how does that relate to or discredit the
article?

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ShabbyDoo
The astroturfing seems so obvious (rapid ramp-up) that I had to wonder if
Romney's campaign was actually behind it. Why not pay a little more to do a
good job -- at a minimum, ramp-up over time. Two possibilities (among many, I
suppose) are that an Obama supporter paid for the fake followers so that a
story could be planted about Romney's deceptive tactics. Another possibility
is that a fake user farm set-up its fakes to follow a few random, high-profile
users to make the fakes seem more legit. If this was the case, why choose
Romney but not Obama? Based solely on the data, we can't know what actually
happened, but it doesn't seem like the article's conclusion was drawn after
exploring alternate possibilities and finding reasons to dismiss them.

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thatusertwo
The twitter user referred to at the end of the article has over 600k
followers, all the ones I checked had a quote as a description and followed
close to 1000 people but tweeted less then 10 times. Makes me wonder how many
of twitters 'users' are fake like this, this guy alone has hundreds of
thousands of them and he is surely not the only one.

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ShabbyDoo
I rarely tweet and have few followers. Every month or so, I get a new, usually
female follower (whom I always flag) which I always presume to be the first
step of some Russian-visitor-ish sort of scam. Perhaps I simply am being used
to make these fake accounts look more legit?

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Kelliot
Why would you do it this way??

If its correct a child could spot problems in all that data. I thought
American politics was smarter then this =(

