Twitter
is abuzz with news that Mitt Romney’s twitter account has added around
100K new followers this weekend. Followers, it seems, who are fake.
Naturally, the inclination is to see it as an attempt to slowly
ratchet up Mitt’s follower counts to
close in on Obama’s, and there’s
been many tweets of derision using the #MoreFakeMitt hashtag.
However, it’s impossible to say who is behind this binge (unless
you’re Twitter and can look into your log files). So it is very
premature to blame the Romney campaign or someone connected to it. In
fact, it could easily be an anti-Romney effort looking to discredit his
campaign. The Romney campaign has denied buying followers. And I’m inclined to believe them.
To understand why I believe them (when I don’t generally trust them),
you have to understand how cheap and easy it is to add followers to
someone else’s account. So let’s look at the mechanics of it:
First, remember that you have no control over your followers. People
choose to follow you or not on their own whim, and you are not
involved. If 100 people choose to follow you tomorrow, you’ll get new
followers. They don’t ask you, they don’t need your permission, and
they don’t need to log into your account to do anything.
Second, while the process of gaining followers is usually a
person-at-a-time kind of thing, if you happen to have multiple Twitter
accounts you can have them all follow the same person. Follower counts
are counts of accounts, not counts of real live people.
Third, since many people desire high follower counts, there is a
not-very-underground market for people who are willing to pay for
followers. The people providing these services have not just one
account, or just a few accounts, but thousands upon thousands of
accounts. All fake, to be sure, but each and every one of them counts
as a follower.
Finally, the people who provide these services care to get paid, they
don’t care whose account they add followers to. I can pay someone to
add followers to my account, or I can pay them to follow yours. They
don’t really care.
How much does it cost to add followers? Single digit $s. On
Fiverr.com, there are nearly 4000 people offering to help with Twitter
followers. Here’s just a sample:
For $5 you can get around 25,000 followers. Mitt’s 100,000 followers could cost someone as little as $20.
And that’s the key. Just about anyone can afford to buy Mitt 100,000
followers. For a lot of people, $20 is almost pocket change. And at
$20, anyone who is motivated to buy followers for Mitt — regardless of
being pro- or anti-Mitt — would find no impediment.
This is the problem that we have now: it’s hard to know who’s doing
this. Twitter can look up the IP addresses of the followers and
determine where they came from, but the odds are the work was done in
some distant (to us) country and the actual purchaser will never be
known.
So why am I inclined to believe the Romney’s campaign assertion that
they’re not doing it? Because there’s no real advantage for them in
doing it. First, Romney (at this moment) has about 800K followers.
Obama has 17 million more. It’s a long, long way to add in 17 million
more to Mitt if the goal is to show he’s on a par. Why bother? Second,
Twitter will eventually remove all the fake followers. Even if the
campaign were to crow about all its new followers, it would end up with
egg on its face when they were removed.
Who do I think did it? I think it’s just a random, unconnected
person who thought this would be a good idea. Whether that person is
pro-Romney or anti-Romney is impossible to guess.
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