Romney camp used Colorado shooting as distraction to hide buy of 100,000 Twitter followers

[Liberal_in_LA]

The Romney campaign is facing allegations of buying Twitter followers after Romney’s Twitter account mysteriously gained more than 135,000 followers since Friday. The Romney campaign denies buying Twitter followers but fails to offer any reasonable explanation for the freakishly rapid growth in the last 48 hours.

The website 140elect.com, which tracks the Twitter presence of presidential candidates, first noticed the spike which began Friday afternoon and continued through Saturday, July 21. According to the website, Romney was gaining around 3,000-4,000 new followers per day for the past month. However, Friday, July 20, the number inexplicably and dramatically jumped as Romney acquired 23,926 new followers. On Saturday, July 21, the numbers exploded as Romney gained well over 75,000 Twitter followers for the day.

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Jason Easley at PoliticusUSA speculates: Something strange is going on with Mitt Romney’s Twitter account. It looks like the Romney campaign is using the Colorado shooting as a distraction to hide their buying 100,000 new Twitter followers.

NY AltNews reports Romney’s Twitter account is now surging with phony followers. The website suggests “spam automation, purchased traffic or perhaps even sabotage” are responsible for the inexplicable, dramatic surge in Romney’s Twitter account.

Romney’s Twitter account had over 673,000 followers on July 20, but his graph made a “hockey stick” leap yesterday, climbing to over 767,000. Nevertheless, Romney’s Twitter account trails Barack Obama's Twitter account by more than 16 million followers.

http://www.examiner.com/article/twittergate-romney-camp-denies-buying-twitter-followers

[Enrique]

1. there's a huge sweatshop somewhere in China

with workers following Romney on Twitter.

[GreatInDayton]

22. TOO funny!

[iamthebandfanman]

27. in all seriousness

china does have large amount of businesses based on these types of things..

did you know you can pay people to get more facebook 'likes' and friends?

just go on ebay and look it up :p

[Enrique]

29. and playing World of Warcraft

"gaming" the game to make money, if the stories I've heard are true.

Following Romney on Twitter has got to be the worst, though. I think I'd rather die in the mines.

[iamthebandfanman]

37. Oh, they are defintiely true..

i used to play online games a couple of years ago (got bored with them all honestly)..
and used a service twice..
i was very picky when i was looking for someone, as you worry (rightfully so) that something is just a front to steal your money (since the product you are receiving is digital and not physical)..

theres actually a US company that does it now..
im sure they use chinese 'farmers' too, but atleast they are HQd here in the states

its a booming industry though over there.. and some of the places are definitely ran like sweat shops.. people literally sleep/live at their computer and make under a dollar an hour.

[66 dmhlt]

33. You mean he even OUTSOURCED his Twitter "followers"? He didn't even buy American?!?

And at least a half-million of his Twitter followers all claim to “live” in a P.O. box in the Cayman Islands.

[Ruby the Liberal]

2. And now he looks like a fool.

Well played, GOP.

[malaise]

13. Looks?

[zeemike]

14. But only to us.

because we see it.
Most of his followers only watch Fox and listen to Limbaugh and right wing blog sites....and will know nothing about it except what is spun out to them...that is why Orwell said ignorance is freedom in his vision of the 1984 world.

[pscot]

3. Dead souls

Chichikov would be proud.

[2pooped2pop]

4. lol Rmoney can buy everything but still 16 mil. behind Obama

[Zalatix]

17. ONLY 16 mil. That's what scares me.

[snooper2]

28. only like 13% of Americans use twitter FYI

[Spazito]

5. That is just so pathetic and....

so like Romney. They buy what they want, whatever they want, including trying to BUY the Presidency, imo.

[Rmoney]

6. Let me make this perfectly clear: My twitter friends are

the best that money can buy.

[Kennah]

23. Welcome, Mittens! Enjoy the short stay. I suspect the parody will eventually violate TOS.

[Systematic Chaos]

26. Seriously, what the hell ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"

I got a good chuckle out of that comment, and unless I've missed something in Rmoney's other 8 posts thus far, I wouldn't waste my time worrying about it.

Sheesh!

[Kennah]

36. I enjoy it as well, but I am just predicting

This is an area where I hope to proven wrong.

[Daemonaquila]

7. More likely, he's taking the opportunity for someone to create them, custom.

Most are clear fakes. The fact that he's doing it now is crazily opportunistic. Does he really believe that numbers alone will get him anywhere? Or does he have some plan for spamming closer to the election? I can't see how that would work for him.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Out-sourced and off-shored twitter accounts.

[surrealAmerican]

9. Can someone explain to me why he's doing this?

Surely, it can't just be in order to claim he has some large number of followers. There just isn't enough political advantage to that.

[Incitatus]

11. To get more people to pay attention to him.

They believe the more followers they buy and the higher that number gets, the more people will decide to follow him on their own. That would be my guess of their reasoning.

[Ruby the Liberal]

15. If he had 100k to Obama's 17.7 million

It would look bad.

[progressivebydesign]

18. Absolutely to make him look more popular.

His cracker jack tech/social media team got together over their Compaq desktop computers and decided that they needed to "hip" him up and bring up those numbers.

No way in hell he got 100k new followers overnight, unless the Mormon Church sent out a mass emailing to their members.

[siligut]

34. He is trying to appear popular

He wants other people to believe that a lot of people like him.

[cleduc]

10. I can't think of anything good that this says

about the candidate.

From all the flip-flops, lies, deceptions, etc, I don't understand how he remains as high as he is in the polls.

[AlbertCat]

25. I don't understand how he remains as high as he is in the polls.

He's white.

[hatrack]

12. Phony purchased Twitter followers are people, my friend.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

21. That made me guffaw.

[progressivebydesign]

16. I took the time yesterday to check profiles on his newest followers. ALL the ones I saw were foreign

Seriously, I checked out a huge number of his followers and they seemed to have NO connection to the guy at all, and a number of the people they were following and the tweets they did were in other languages that I didn't recognize.

There is a huge market for this: http://buytwitterfollow.com/ is just one of the jerks that offer this...

I'm so damn naive, that it never occurred to me until I was in a photo contest online, and I kept noticing every time I entered something like that, the most inane photos would win. Someone mentioned that people buy votes for those things, and then I found out you can buy twitter followers, too.

They basically have follower networks and farms, most often overseas.. usually Philippines, and they get paid to follow. It's obvious that this is what he did. Take a gander at some of his new followers...

I swear that he has the most inept and crooked technology staff in history. First it was the "Amercia" then the various meme FAILS, and now this. Geez.. who says money can't by friends?

BTW, he's NOW up to 818k!! Another leap.

[Zalatix]

19. He actually thought that he wouldn't get caught, either. Fool.

[progressivebydesign]

20. LOVE the new hashtag @morefakemitt

One guy had this "Tweets for hire. Slowly depleting the offshore accounts one day at a time. (don't get excited, no actual affiliation)"

I noticed that there are more Americans in there today, but mostly seem to be church people. Seriously, I have no doubt the Mormons are rallying their people now (and enjoying the tax breaks for their mega malls at the same time.)

[Scuba]

24. All part of the election-rigging process.

[Tx4obama]

30. Here are some links to earlier articles when it was first noticed

July 21
Is Mitt Romney Buying Phony Twitter Followers?
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/07/21/561221/is-mitt-romney-buying-phony-twitter-followers/

July22
Mitt Romney Buying Twitter Followers?

nyaltnews via thinkprogress: “It seems to have started Friday, when Romney’s typical average of 3,ooo-4,000 per day increased some twenty fold to over 62,000 in a single day, according to TwitterCounter.com. But the new followers are highly suspect. From “empty” accounts to pornbots, spambots, Justin Beiber-related accounts, Obama supporters and foreign accounts, the followers tell a puzzling tale, suggesting spam automation, purchased traffic or perhaps even sabotage.”

http://www.alan.com/2012/07/22/mitt-romney-buying-twitter-followers/

http://www.alan.com/2012/07/23/romney-campaign-denies-buying-twitter-followers/

[Smilo]

31. Of course they are all little

robots............

[Historic NY]

32. Ha hope their not all the sex trade swapping ones that keep hitting my account...

that would be

[DonRedwood]

35. gross

everything about Romney is sleazy and gross.