First Rule of Power Tactics:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
https://gobling.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/redux-revolution-alinsky-sanders-and-the-false-campaign/
This is one of the most conspicuous of Sanders maneuvers, seen in social media and naively portrayed in mainstream media as fact. The digital ocean is a perfect vehicle for creating a presence, whether legitimate or not. It accounts for thousands of Twitter and Facebook users along with a corps on Reddit, who proclaim Bernies infallibility as an alternate presidential choice.
However, a painstaking look at these online entities will show duplicates, bots and just plain fakes. Nonpartisan and commercial accounts are requisitioned for the cause as seen in a sample Twitter list called Bernie Supporters. This holds nearly 4,000 users, each manually added by the list owner. Travel through this list, and one will find supporters for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton. There are people living outside the U.S., spam accounts, business and university accounts, comic book, gamers, techies and anime aficionados. A core of genuine Bernie followers does exist but these are padded by the hundreds of appropriated users.
As can be seen, the illusion of an enormous presence is easy to accomplish in the online world. Padded lists on Twitter and triplicate presences in every predominant social media outlet create a false effect of power.
One of the first and perhaps, best best investments made by Bernie Sanders was purchasing the services of Revolution Messaging, a company equated with successful online campaigns. It represented then-Senator Barrack Obama in his first Presidential campaign. Listed among its former clients is MoveOn, the behemoth organization that helped drive Obama (and many other Democrats) to victory. Revolution Messaging provides a number of apps and tools to magnify presence in a coordinated online effort. Twitter storms, coordinated fast response tweets and inflated poll results are evidence of this effort.