

Statistical analysis shows Romney's new Twitter followers are fake - alexismadrigal
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/statistical-probability-that-mitt-romneys-new-twitter-followers-are-just-normal-users-0/260539/

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Turing_Machine
"We did not find a similar pattern in Barack Obama's recent followers. "

Why would you expect the patterns to be remotely similar? Obama has been the
President for over 3 years. Romney has been a presidential candidate for a few
months.

"Our test is based on the underlying assumption that the followers of Twitter
accounts tend to display a some kind of general indegree distribution."

Unwarranted assumption. It could be that many new people are joining Twitter
JUST to follow the Romney campaign.

"Selected the twenty accounts closest in size to both Romney and Obama,"

I'm not sure why anyone would consider this a valid sampling technique.

"The median number of followers for Romney's new followers was 5, whereas the
median for the comparison group was 27. This represents a stark, and
statistically significant difference. If you are a statistics nerd, like us,
you might want to know that the p-value on this was 0.0000. "

Not if the "comparison group" is completely bogus.

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Turing_Machine
A better comparison group would be people who have gone from (relative)
obscurity to extreme prominence over a short period of time. Sheer number of
followers doesn't seem to be important (particularly since I would expect most
of the accounts with that many followers to belong to people who have a) been
prominent for quite some time and b) have been on Twitter for quite some
time).

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dmlorenzetti
The graphs comparing the "indegree" distribution of each candidate's new
followers to that of comparable accounts would be much more informative if
they showed the _distribution_ of distributions.

In other words, show the range of indegree distributions from the 20
comparison accounts (not just their average).

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waterlesscloud
Why not just name the comparison accounts?

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toomuchcoffee
This is awesome. _The Atlantic_ just made up for its reddit spamming (sort
of).

