Mitt Romney Denies Buying 150,000 Twitter Followers

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney‘s Twitter follower count experienced an explosion of new followers this weekend, but many of the new followers seem more like bots and fake accounts than enthusiastic Republican voters.

Romney’s account gained more than 150,000 followers in four days, a marked surge in contrast to the 3,000 to 4,000 his account typically picks up a day. The increase began Friday around 5 p.m. Many of these new followers had no tweets or followers. Others had a handful of tweets that were either unintelligible or in another language.

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The Romney campaign denied buying new Twitter followers and said it contacted Twitter “to find out additional information regarding the rapid growth.”

140Elect, which tracks Twitter during the campaign, noticed that despite the rise in followers, there was no corresponding increase in Twitter mentions or retweets.

“Personally, I think this is too obvious for the Romney campaign to have done,” Zach Green of 140Elect said. “It’s more likely somebody is trying to plant a story to embarrass him. The question then is: who controls 100,000+ Twitter accounts like this?”

Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was accused of buying Twitter followers in August, PeekYou, a search company, said based on their analytics, about eight percent of his account’s followers were real people.

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Follow Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) on Twitter

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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