Saturday, July 21, 2012

Romney's Fake Twitter Followers ~ Updated


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The story Via 140Elect.com
I’m not saying he bought them, but Romney’s follower stats have taken a sharp and sudden rise since Friday 5PM EST. Could it be a weekend blitz?

Twitter noticed. Here are the numbers:


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Romney was gaining around 3000-4000 new followers per day for the past month. Yesterday he acquired 23,926 new followers and is climbing well over 50,000 today. The hourly stats make it pretty clear where this began.

List of Mitt Romney's Followers ~ Now up to 776,036.

A quick check of the link reveals that it indeed appears that rmoney has purchased countless followers with similar computer generated names and email addresses. Notice they have no tweets and follow the same few "people?"
There are some profiles with tweets -- some of which make no sense and/or are in other languages.
~ Illustrated Analysis by joeschmeaux on Daily Kos

Every time i refresh he gets 50 or so new followers. Most followers are following exactly 4 people. Most have no tweets or one generic quote tweet from a semifamous person.
The tweets these people have made are almost all done in the last minute or so for the new additions to the list.
While that is evidence of nothing, it certainly is suspicious.
~ comment by delirium2K on Reddit

So the random name generators obviously designates the person a first and last name.
For instance: Cotton Dundermuff
More interesting, there's another random generated string which helps determine the username. Usually it's 3 or 4 letters tagged onto the first name.
"Cottonsytit" "Dennisplr" "Sallyeddcd"
This saves the script from having to guess names that already exist. These random text strings will help us find all the robo accounts once they are FULLY INTEGRATED INTO SOCIETY.
~ comment by jessepots on Reddit

Yeah, I work for a social media firm (which doesn't purchase twitter followers), and I can all but guarantee that that is a bot of some sort. You don't get organic follower growth like that without following accounts.
~ comment by dabernathy89 on Reddit

Look at this trend: http://twittercounter.com/compare/MittRomney/month/followers Yesterday, he gained the same amount he normally gains in a day TIMES 20. The statistical probability of this actually happening is on the order of 2.2204460e-16, which is 1 out of 4,503,599,730,000,000. You can expect this to happen once every 12.33 trillion years. To give you an idea, the age of the universe is about 14.6 billion years. So if Romney campaigned for the entire age of the universe times a thousand, it would happen approximately once.
~ comment by OddOliver on Reddit
























Dear Mitt Romney, the internet is aware that you are buying fake Twitter followers
We track these Twitter stats since September 26, 2008. You can see how many followers Mitt Romney lost or gained and what the prediction is for tomorrow or the next 15 days, together with all kinds of other stats like rank compared to all Twitter users, tweets etc.
~ The Progressive Mind

Mitt Romney Twitter Counter:












From NY Alt News
Romney’s account had over 673,000 followers on July 20 following his typical numbers, but his graph made a “hockey stick” leap yesterday, climbing to over 767,000 as I write.

With some onlookers assuming the Romney campaign is buying accounts to pad his numbers, we highly doubt they would be so clumsy. Last summer, Newt Gingrich received embarrassing national press when he had 1.3 million followers at a time no other GOP candidate even had 100,000 followers. The news then had sport reporting over 90% were fake accounts.

Just yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was exposed as it was discovered that New Delhi was the most popular source for “shares” on his “Rush Babes for America” Facebook promotion. This suggested he was outsourcing “astroturf” by paying experts in India to pad his traffic figures and perceived female support.

But Romney’s followers are not necessarily being bought. It could be that he has become more popular because his account is promoted more heavily by Twitter as a “you might want to follow” suggestion. Many of President Obama’s 17 million followers are also spambot or questionable accounts, but his numbers have been climbing predictably where Romney’s sudden spike invites more questions.



We have reached out to Twitter to find out additional information regarding the rapid growth.
~ Zac Moffat, Romney's Digital Director, on BuzzFeed

I have many fans and suc.....devotees on my side here and abroad. In fact, I'm having a wonderful campaign fundraiser in London with a few very dear foreign friends of mine from Barcley's.
Of course, I wouldn't expect any of you people to understand the complexities of being a Swiss account owner such as I.
~ Rmoney on Democratic Underground












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