100K in a day seems like sloppy astroturfing. Why not add on smoothly over the course of weeks? At only $800/thousand followers, perhaps $80K was spent by an Obama supporter to create a news story and discredit Romney? Perhaps Romney was the inadvertent target of these astroturfing firms' efforts to make their fake users seem more legit? I checked out Obama's follower stats, and he experienced no such bump. Why pick sides if your goal is simply to sell fake followers random folks?
[I'm not necessarily a fan of either major party candidate, so please don't consider this a political discussion.]
Twitter follower updates lag like YouTube views. I expect this kind of political finger pointing will continue and gather steam on HN until the election. If Obama is re-elected then it will essentially stop, but if Romney is elected it will continue up for the next four years. This site is like r/technology-lite in many ways.
I see two interesting aspects of the issue: (1) the astounding value in affecting perceptions of one's popularity and (2) the implementation schemes for #1. Whether Romney/Obama/whomever took any particular action is only a concrete instance upon which to consider these two ideas.
I'm confused, who's picking sides? I just read an article about twitter followers based on observable statistics. Why are you talking about hypothetical astroturfing, and how does that relate to or discredit the article?
The astroturfing seems so obvious (rapid ramp-up) that I had to wonder if Romney's campaign was actually behind it. Why not pay a little more to do a good job -- at a minimum, ramp-up over time. Two possibilities (among many, I suppose) are that an Obama supporter paid for the fake followers so that a story could be planted about Romney's deceptive tactics. Another possibility is that a fake user farm set-up its fakes to follow a few random, high-profile users to make the fakes seem more legit. If this was the case, why choose Romney but not Obama? Based solely on the data, we can't know what actually happened, but it doesn't seem like the article's conclusion was drawn after exploring alternate possibilities and finding reasons to dismiss them.
The twitter user referred to at the end of the article has over 600k followers, all the ones I checked had a quote as a description and followed close to 1000 people but tweeted less then 10 times. Makes me wonder how many of twitters 'users' are fake like this, this guy alone has hundreds of thousands of them and he is surely not the only one.
I rarely tweet and have few followers. Every month or so, I get a new, usually female follower (whom I always flag) which I always presume to be the first step of some Russian-visitor-ish sort of scam. Perhaps I simply am being used to make these fake accounts look more legit?
[I'm not necessarily a fan of either major party candidate, so please don't consider this a political discussion.]