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Marketplace Tech Report for Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Aug 8, 2012

Marketplace Tech Report for Wednesday, August 8, 2012

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Mitt Romney is being followed by robots. Seriously. On Twitter. The presumptive GOP nominee recently saw a dramatic spike in his follower count: 116,000 in just one day. Most of those followers, however, are fakes. Twitter is crawling with fake people. Why? Money. And while these bots are mostly harmless, the technology is improving, making it increasingly difficult to tell who's real or who's not.

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Romney's spike in followers makes us ask: What is a person?

Aug 8, 2012
A large number "people" on Twitter are just bits of code intent on spamming.

Mitt Romney is being followed by robots. Seriously. On Twitter. The presumptive GOP nominee recently saw a dramatic spike in his follower count: 116,000 in just one day. Most of those followers, however, are fakes. Twitter is crawling with fake people. Why? Money. And while these bots are mostly harmless, the technology is improving, making it increasingly difficult to tell who’s real or who’s not.

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