NY Times reports: 70% of Obama’s Twitter followers are fake

reply to post by spoor


K.

That being said,WHY would anyone want to fake their popularity, especially the President, or Presidential hopeful?


I find it hypocritical, Ironic, stupid, and WHY I don't subscribe to Twitter, or Facebook. Just my 2 cents........

reply to post by sonnny1


FYI...the president isn't the only one that does it. I don't use Twitter..but really dude if you need someone to explain it to you maybe you should just google it. There's lots of losers out there that create fake accounts...

Originally posted by spoor

Originally posted by moniesisfun
reply to post by spoor

 

actually nearly the exact opposite is true and ANYONE wiloing to look at the links can verify this

all that needs to be said.

And you are wrong again, as here is the NY Times article,
www.nytimes.com...

Now everyone can see that you are wrong again!

But Obama is king of the fake followers for sure.

He has the most by far.

I guess we finally know why the Obama Campaign is asking for small donations

btw, the OP isn't linking to your NYT story.

Time to fess up .... Obama is a winner of fakers !!

Originally posted by nightstalker78
reply to post by sonnny1

 

FYI...the president isn't the only one that does it. I don't use Twitter..but really dude if you need someone to explain it to you maybe you should just google it. There's lots of losers out there that create fake accounts...

I know hes not the only one. But...........

Hes the President. Really?

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. ~ Barack Obama





Come on.......

Loser, is exactly what I was thinking.

They could have just made it easy and said the following...

"Obama is a fake".

and for those that like to tie other people into it (so their guy dont look bad alone)they should have also said..

"Romney is fake too".

"And so are all of their followers".

In all fairness, just as the MSM "overplayed" Obama's popularity in 2008. They could be "underplaying" Romney's support in 2012.

Facebook's IPO price sank as quick as it hit the market. Investors realized the fake accounts.

reply to post by RELDDIR




why would you even invest in FB to begin with?!

reply to post by xuenchen


Obama is extremely popular all around the world, Romney, not so much. Pretty sure RomRom is the one with the most fakes.

reply to post by nightstalker78


I don't invest in FB or gamble. If Romney-Ryan had a stock market, I'd put money in that. LOL
(Momentum in investment markets often takes time to shift but once it does, look out)

I don't care if it's 20% or 70% .... just the fact that Obama (and/or his team) faked the numbers is beyond funny! Seriously ... Mr. Transparency strikes again.

Most "celebs" have fake followers as well. Its not even real people either. Bunch of mule accounts. We need to find out who exactly created these accounts.


In my opinion its part of the illusion to show todays "icons" have more fans than they really do.

Originally posted by CaLyps0
Most "celebs" have fake followers as well.

Celebs make endorsement deals for twitter. They get companies to pay them to 'tweet' about them. The more followers the celeb has, the more money they get from companies to tweet about their products.

So I can see why the celebs fake followers. They get more money from the fakes ...

Wonder what Obama (or any politician) gets for having millions of fake followers ....

At any rate ... Mr Transparency eh??

reply to post by xuenchen

Originally posted by xuenchen
But Obama is king of the fake followers for sure.

He has the most by far.

Can you actually prove ANYTHING that you say?

Your spin is so old. Obama has fake followers and so does every famous person, but you only point out Obama, as if he has ANYTHING to do with it... Lame... again.

You can buy your own fake followers, which for people with few friends, might save them the embarrassment of only having a "following" of a few people.

But there's another force at work here, which is the spammers and advertisers, who create fake accounts to follow major celebrities and political figures, so they can then spam all the other accounts also following that celeb/politico.

That's exactly what was at work with the tool NY Times used to determine how many account following Obama were fake. Example: Status People (statuspeople.com) - Fake Follower:

What is Fake Follower Check?
Fake Follower Check does what it says. It checks your Twitter followers to see if they are real or fake. Or in other words, it checks to see how many spam accounts are following you. And the great thing about it is you can check your friends and 'enemies' too...

Why did you create it?
After reading the Kernel Mag's posts on the subject of fake followers we thought it would be a nice idea to create a tool that allows you to check how many fake followers you and your friends have.

How does it work?
We take a sample of your follower data. Up to 1,000 records depending on how 'popular' you are and assess them against a number of simple spam criteria.

On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts.

So before you rush to judgement and claim Obama (or Romney) paid to have shills follow them, just remember, most of the fake accounts that do follow them are spammers, and are working against their wishes.

reply to post by FlyersFan


Romney was accused of buying fake twitter follower long before Obama. But one of the reasons it never became a big deal is that most rational people realize it is the work of spammers. But as soon as the headlines read "Obama buys fake follower", all the irrational people crawl out of their holes to point fingers, without looking at the mechanics behind the scenes.

Romney Twitter account gets upsurge in fake followers, but from where?

A suspiciously large uptick in Mitt Romney's Twitter followers caught the attention of the tech community recently. While some suspected the campaign had sought a bump in social media presence by possibly paying for followers, the Romney camp says no, "we don't need fake followers." So what's the deal?

Over 24 hours starting July 21, the presumptive Republican nominee acquired nearly 117,000 followers — an increase of about 17 percent. Such a large and rapid increase was immediately noted by bloggers and Twitter commentators.

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.

In fact, it's probable that most major figures on Twitter have a significant proportion of bot followers. Barracuda told NBC News that it is conducting further investigations, into both Obama and Romney's followers, to seek out fake accounts and clues as to their origins.

So the strange thing about this whole situation is not that there are fake people following Romney, but that so many of them began following him all at once.

What separates the fake followers between Romney and Obama, is that Romney's all started following him at the same time - making it look like a purchased following, as opposed to the work of spam bots. Obama's growth in twitter followers has been steady. That doesn't mean a large number of spam accounts could have created the surge in Romney's following, with spammers, anything's possible.

If you're so willing to jump on Obama for this, then it goes double for Willard.

A huge number of accounts on both Facebook and Twitter are fake. How is this even news?

Create an account and accept everyone. It's almost guaranteed you will have fake/bot followers.

Most interestingly, during our investigation, Republican nominee for US President Mitt Romney has been scrutinized recently for his abnormal increase in new followers (@mittromney), indicating that these followers had been purchased in the same way as the Dealers/Abuser scenario from our study. We do note that these followers could have been purchased by either himself, his associates or by his opponents. Particularly, on July 21st, 2012, his follower number went from 673,002 to 789,924, representing a gain of 116,922 or 17%. As this story picked up momentum, we quickly pulled his newest followers since the big breakout, (resulting in 152,966 new Twitter accounts), and can disclose several interesting statistics of these followers.

Statistics of Romney’s newest 152,966 Twitter followers(between Jul 21st and Jul 26th 2012):

• The number of Romney’s followers increased 17% (or 116,922) on a single day Jul 21, 2012, going from 673,002 to 789,924
  
• 25% of these followers are less than 3 weeks old (created after July 17th 2012), 80% of them are less than 3 months old
  
• 23% or about 1/4 of these followers have no tweet
  
• 10% of these account has already been suspended by Twitter

Based on the above distinguishable features, we believe most of these recent followers of Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely from a paid Twitter follower service. Also notice that Romney’s newest followers did have few different statistical features than our purchased followers (e.g. much newer than ours), indicating his followers were purchased from a different data resource than ours.

Now to be fair to Romney, some of the services selling fake accounts may have thought having their fakes follow Romney made them appear more legitimate. Where else can you dump 116,000+ accounts in a single day, where it wouldn't look awkward? You need a major twitter account with a huge following (such as a celeb or major political figure) to have your fake accounts follow, to build some history.

Personally, I do not believe Romney OR Obama paid to have fake twitter followers follow them. This is the work of spam bots and fake follower services, misusing the accounts of Romney and Obama. You'll find the same fake accounts following Kim Kardashian or Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber.

So Obama thinks that more followers means more people should vote for him? Oh man it's high school all over again.

Originally posted by IntoxicatingMadness
So Obama thinks that more followers means more people should vote for him? Oh man it's high school all over again.

Where did you get that out of any of this?