(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Mitt Romney, now at around around 800,000 Twitter followers. This is no big deal, as Obama has nearly 700,000 as of now. The controversy here is how quickly Romney hit that number. Romney had Under 670,000 3 days ago. Is it possible for someone to receive of 100,000 followers in a day? Yes. Is is likely? No.

In a 3rd party study, the 110,000 flash twitter followers were almost all found to have been made recently (3 weeks) and all have a huge followers to following ratio, which are signs of twitter boosting accounts. Of them, 10% have already been banned off of twitter. The question no longer is if the followers are fake, but who purchased them. As many of us on here know, anyone can get access to these bots. Is it really that bad for a political canidate to start taking advantage of them?

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When Twitter followers (incohrerent bots that don't make any decisions for that matter) become any sort of pinnacle for an election process, we have bigger problems than deciding whether it's controversial or not.

An example is: Candidates are buying Twitter followers.

There is nothing I can say to enforce how utterly sad that is. It amazes me that the media would throw such hysteria around it. I could understand if it was like bribing big names to support them on Twitter or something, like unofficial funding to ask a big name to ask their followers to support Romney - but it's not. It's just follower count, and they're bots. He's not exactly revolutionizing anything and I don't think anyone should base any opinion on a candidate because of their Twitter followers.

If you're an uniformed american who hasn't read anything on the candidates, would you vote for the person with 500 followers or 500,000? I can almost guarantee at least 10,000 people across the country will be somewhat influenced by these twitter accounts. I believe 10,000 votes would be the difference between Gore and Bush in 00'. Also, you can pay for re-tweets too, which then is basically extra advertising. If you say that doesn't make a difference, you're saying TV ads don't make a difference.

In the 2000 elections, Bush didn't win the popular vote and only got it because of the electoral vote. The most controversial states are Florida (full of retired people) and Iowa (full of corn chuckers), both stereotypes don't use Twitter - and if they do, they don't pay attention to Romney or Obama on them. Twitter's not going to make or break a narrow electoral margin.

I totally agree with you man

So you say that it's a bad thing politics revolves around twitter, yet you vastly generalise to show that it's invalid? Sorry, but that makes no sense at all to me. Personally, I don't use twitter, yet I read about this in July. When Social Media is such a huge factor in this day and age, and with the amount of serious news stories concerning twitter you can hardly say that it will have no impact on an election. Even if twitter was of as little importance as you imply, the fact that a Presidential candidate would falsify such benign data in order to gain a negligible lead is something that I would consider very telling of his true election tactics.

Yeah I would worry about Romney's fake twitter followers or even Obama's. Romney's voters are mostly elderly people who don't even use a computer. Obama has followers not just in the US but worldwide because he's very admired (i don't but I respect him and think he's been your best president for the past half-century)

Romney is gettin young people.
Especially here in NY

i agree i really like obama to bad you cant just revote for bill again he was even better