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Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

sawyerloggingon

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Apparently obama is not as popular as he pretends to be. How pathetic do you have to have to be to fake twitter followers.


"President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased."


Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers
 
Oh well - in that case . . .
 
Apparently obama is not as popular as he pretends to be. How pathetic do you have to have to be to fake twitter followers.

"President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased."

Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

I will give President Obama credit for having the most digitally-savvy campaign strategy in history, both in 2008 and 2012. I guess they do have an app for that; and I guess Twitter followers can be purchased. It's all smoke and mirrors, folks.
 
Who the hell even knew, let alone cared, how many twitter followers the president was supposed to have had?

Now, if he had claimed to have had 18.8 million ideas about how to get this nation back on track financially, how to get the troops home from Iraq and Afganistan without leaving civil wars behind, how to end illegal immigration, or how to pick the Bill of Rights back up and dust the footprints off of it, then it would matter whether those ideas were fake or not.
 
Maybe I should have put this on the bias media forum. Farther down in the article they try to excuse obama with this fabricated BS. What a joke.

"Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well."


No evidence whatsoever just lib media spin, I demand this gets moved to bias media forum damnit.:lol:

EDIT: "A good bet"????? WTF kind of journalism is THAT???
 
Maybe I should have put this on the bias media forum. Farther down in the article they try to excuse obama with this fabricated BS. What a joke.

"Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well."


No evidence whatsoever just lib media spin, I demand this gets moved to bias media forum damnit.:lol:

EDIT: "A good bet"????? WTF kind of journalism is THAT???

Actually, being a follower of Romney on Facebook it isn't a good bet, it tends to be true. There are people who like him that are Obama supporters or are pissed off Republicans that do not like him. This is just part of the digital age now.
 
If twitter is deciding how people vote, we're more screwed than I thought.
 
That's the same with half of the crap on Twitter.

It's a social media plague-designed primarily for popularity contests. Of course followers were going to be sold on eBay.
 
I forgot, why do we care how many twitter followers he has? I'm still walking a razors edge between the two candidates, but even if I was fully decided at this point, I wouldn't follow them on twitter. Nobody posts anything important or mind boggling on twitter. Heck, the political tweets I've seen make the biggest splash were just straight stupid, not important. *COUGH* Santorum *COUGH*
 
"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."

This kind of reasoning hurts my head.... I have only 100 family/ real life friends on it but I'm following (through subscription) about 500-600 different artists/models who I've worked with in the past but don't feel like having them as friends. Does that make my account fake? No. It means "StatusPeople" is pretty stupid.
 
Very comical.

Do you think there is someone in his "marketing department" in charge of social media. You know there is. Can you imagine during their last evaluation..."yah, in the last six months we added 1 million twitter followers." Marketing boss: Great job.

Ooops, someone is in trouble. Probably not...
 
I am waiting for somebody to say that even half at 9.4 milion is good and excuse the lying.
 
You must have an exceedingly large and extended family.;)

A L

You should see the family reunions we have in California. My wive's relatives alone make up about 8-10 cars. Mine isn't that big but it's not rare for Sunday dinners at my mom's to have people asking around for parking place.
 
Apparently obama is not as popular as he pretends to be. How pathetic do you have to have to be to fake twitter followers.


"President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased."


Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

well we do know he has MILLIONS OF TWITS supporting him
 
How does one create a million fake twitter accounts in 2 days?

Are that many people signing up for twitter daily that a 500,000 fake accounts created at once don't get noticed?

Someone explain this because the logistics of this seem totally bogus.
 
How does one create a million fake twitter accounts in 2 days?

Are that many people signing up for twitter daily that a 500,000 fake accounts created at once don't get noticed?

Someone explain this because the logistics of this seem totally bogus.

Even if they were noticed, no reason to put a stop to it. Their advertising is based on how many accounts they have, how many ppl view the page, etc.


Regarding the OP: Why do we care? I think it's interesting they chose to spend the money that way, but other than that, I don't care.

I think we can file Twittergate as having been exposed and move on.
 
How does one create a million fake twitter accounts in 2 days?

Are that many people signing up for twitter daily that a 500,000 fake accounts created at once don't get noticed?

Someone explain this because the logistics of this seem totally bogus.

It's just bots you can buy.
 
It's just bots you can buy.

But Twitter seriously doesn't notice 500,000 new accounts being created at once and following just 1 person?

How do you even go about registering a million accounts in one day without attracting attention? Doesn't Twitter keep IP tracks? 500,000 coming from 1 IP and that's normal? Wtf? This all seems from a logistical standpoint bogus.
 
But Twitter seriously doesn't notice 500,000 new accounts being created at once and following just 1 person?

How do you even go about registering a million accounts in one day without attracting attention? Doesn't Twitter keep IP tracks? 500,000 coming from 1 IP and that's normal? Wtf? This all seems from a logistical standpoint bogus.

Twitter doesn't care at the moment.
 
As I said when sawyer made a deal of this in the media bias forum...

Who gives a swut? Do we decide the election based on Twitter?

Of ciurse his beef there was that the NYT speculated that Romney had some fake followers. Which he probably does. Or should if the people working for him are doing their jobs.
 
Maybe I should have put this on the bias media forum. Farther down in the article they try to excuse obama with this fabricated BS. What a joke.

"Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well."


No evidence whatsoever just lib media spin, I demand this gets moved to bias media forum damnit.:lol:

EDIT: "A good bet"????? WTF kind of journalism is THAT???

Actually, Romney does have fake twitter followers:

From Web Pro News:

A new tool from Status People allows anyone to look at the breakdown of followers of any Twitter users to see how many are “fake,” “inactive,” and “good.” [...]Mitt Romney, on the other hand, only has 900,000 followers total. Only 16% of those are fake, according to the tool. That amounts to around 144,000 phantom followers.


From Arstechnica:

More than 15 percent of Mitt Romney's Twitter followers may be generated by paid services that use fake accounts to artificially inflate the number of people subscribed to the presumptive Republican nominee for US president, according to a new report.


From Russia Today (1st quote) and NBC News (second quote):

"Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney made headlines with his Twitter account earlier this month after it was discovered that the presumptive GOP nominee for president magically accumulated more than 100,000 new social networking followers in only a single short weekend."

"Barracuda Labs decided to look closely at the data, as part of a larger investigation of purchased Twitter followers. After analyzing Romney's 152,966 newest followers (as of July 26, when they collected the data), the conclusion was inescapable: A huge proportion of them were almost certainly fake."


Either way, who really cares. It just shows how sad both candidates are that they need fake Twitter followers.
 
Since i guess the followers known as twits matter to some people, so perhaps we should do the numbers here. let us say the news is right that obama has 70 percent fake twitter followers. That would leave him with over 5 million real followers. I don't really give a ****, but that would seem to be a lot more than Mitt has after buying his followers.

Don't worry, Mitt has far more twits following him IRL than obama could ever get.
 
Twitter doesn't care at the moment.

Actually twitter does care. It actually helps them to say "we have this many accounts" despite the fact that lots of those accounts are fake, inactive, roleplayers, or basically not real people. This is why there is little to no effort made to verify accounts aside from an email address that can be just as fake. Still, i will worry about all of this the day they let people vote with twitter accounts.
 
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