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Codebreaker

15% of Mitt Romney’s followers are fake

John Moe Aug 7, 2012

Not fake like they say they totally like your outfit but they really don’t think the outfit is very cute but fake as in not actually people. Spambots, other bots, weird artificial creations that we don’t know why they exist. This according to Barracuda Security, a security company with a weird name because I don’t think of barracudas as being particularly careful or vigilant animals.

Venture Beat reports that there’s a retail market for fake Twitter accounts and that a single dealer can operate up to 150,000 accounts:

These paid services are part of a thriving underground market. The report uncovered 20 sellers on eBay and 58 websites out of the Google Top 100 search results that sell fake Twitter profiles. Search for “buy Twitter followers,” and you’ll quickly find hundreds — if not thousands — of services offering to to set you up with a large following.
This news follows Twitter’s recent crackdown on services like TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, and other spammers that track trending conversations and purposely inject marketing materials.

Romney is way behind President Obama in number of Twitter followers but the Romney campaign says it’s not buying followers.

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