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Monday, July 23, 2012

2012 / Teh Internets Did Mitt Romney Buy Thousands of Followers on Twitter Over the Weekend?

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:50 AM

On Friday afternoon, a funny thing happened: Mitt Romney started adding followers by the thousand on Twitter. According to this chart at Buzzfeed, they added almost 98,000 followers at the peak of the swarm. Thing is, nothing about Romney's Twitter feed changed. The campaign didn't tweet anything out of the ordinary. The numbers just started, peaked, and then declined in a perfect arc centering around the 21st and 22nd.

So far as I know, this kind of thing can only happen in one of three ways: Either you can (1.) post something that becomes viral; someone else can (2.) organize a follower gold rush for you, with a series of Twitter users encouraging their followers to follow a specific account; or (3.) you can buy followers from a disreputable service. The quality of Romney's new followers appears to be low; the majority of his new followers are mostly bots who only follow a handful of other accounts and don't ever post anything themselves. (Bot-making is one of those weird internet industries, like WoW gold-farming, that has popped up in the last few years, wherein people earn fractions of pennies to create new Twitter accounts.) The low quality indicates we're dealing with option 3. (The benefit of gaining new followers—even fake followers who don't really exist—is that it increases your rankings on Twitter, which leads more, quality followers to your feed.)

Romney's people deny that they bought followers:

Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign's digital director, rejected accusations that the campaign was "buying" followers for Romney, who trails Barack Obama's account by more than 16 million followers.
"We have reached out to Twitter to find out additional information regarding the rapid growth," he told BuzzFeed.

I think the only options are that the Romney campaign is lying and didn't realize that the jump in followers would be noticed, or that someone else did this on behalf of the Romney campaign without their knowledge. Either way, it's another sign that the Romney campaign isn't exactly ship-shape, internally.

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Comments (12) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

He might have bought followers from Twitter Ads - which I'd argue is probably not a disreputable service, since it is officially through Twitter. Though, in my experience, sometimes bots make it through from Twitter Ads, too.

Posted by elise81

on July 23, 2012 at 11:09 AM

Yeah, but... does this matter? I mean, Romney's a douche, but the election isn't judged on quality or number of Twitter followers.

Posted by NateMan on July 23, 2012 at 11:14 AM

@2: It just further proves that he/his campaign is more interested in the shape of the thing, rather than the thing itself. "Obama beats us by 16 million Twitter followers. Should we do the hard work to win over the Twitter using demographic? Should we spend time and resources to increase awareness of our Twitter feed? No. We should just buy 75,000 or so fake followers. Same bottom line."

And if he/his advisors think that's the right answer now, do you want them using that judgement in the Oval Office?

Posted by Cracker Jack on July 23, 2012 at 11:26 AM

BREAKING NEWS ! ! !

It has just been learned that Mitt Romney, presidential candidate in the USA, has a backup plan.

Should he lose the upcoming presidential election, he has accepted the offer from Hollywood to star in their sequel to Atlas Shrugged, tentatively titled,

I am John Galt

Appropriate.

Posted by sgt_doom on July 23, 2012 at 11:31 AM

I told you that buying a few racks of 128core blade servers with a few server personnel would allow you to create lots of fake FB followers.

But, no, you refused to believe this only cost about $10,000 in India and China with a few voter record matchups to make them appear to be "real".

You can also buy ads that look cool but if you "like" them it turns out you "like" his page. I got tons of sponsored ads for that on my fake accounts.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on July 23, 2012 at 11:41 AM

Is it conceivable that the people who create these fake twitter followers have their fake twits follow some people to provide verisimilitude to those twitter accounts, in addition to the people they're paid to follow?

Posted by Warren Terra on July 23, 2012 at 11:44 AM

This is off-topic, but I had an Obama supporter knock on my door this Saturday. I spent about 10 minutes talking to him and he was HORRIBLE. He did not know how to talk to a liberal that was not a fan of Obama. He had 4 talking points he felt comfortable talking about. 1. Healthcare 2. Jobs 3. Osama Bin Laden 4. Romney is an idiot! If you pressed him about topics outside his comfort zone, he had nothing. (Although he was very knowledgeable about local politics, so we chatted about that for awhile). My point is, that if these campaigners/canvassers are trying to get the independent vote, they may want to brush up on some other issues.

And when someone actually answers the door and they say that they are not sure about voting for Obama, don't say, "What can I say to get your vote?" That is just idiotic.

Posted by sisyphusgal on July 23, 2012 at 11:44 AM

Between the bot-generated twitter followers and how much he likes to court corporate interests, Romney is becoming the candidate of pretend people.

Posted by Zebes

on July 23, 2012 at 12:04 PM

Spam alert @5.

Posted by DOUG.

on July 23, 2012 at 12:04 PM

Are you telling me that Rmoney outsourced his twitter followers? Hilarious. That'll get them off your outaourcing tail, Mittens!

Posted by FonsieScheme on July 23, 2012 at 12:46 PM

He showed up as a "Promoted" suggestion in my twitter iphone app this weekend. I assume that means he paid twitter to place him at the top of my suggestions list.

Posted by Mark Is Married

on July 23, 2012 at 1:48 PM

@7: So basically you deliberately wasted a canvasser's time, knowing all along that you'd already made up your mind and nothing he could say was going to change it, just so you could brag later in an online forum about how much more knowledgeable you are than the person who actually chooses to get involved by going door-to-door?

Yeah, you're right. Those canvassers should totally spend more time practicing their debate techniques in case they run across a self-righteous "progressive" none-of-the-above voter. True, it won't generate any extra votes for their candidate, but at least they'll feel like they tried.

Posted by Proteus on July 23, 2012 at 2:56 PM