More Lies: Most of Barrack Obama’s Twitter Followers Don’t Even Exist
It appears even more deception surrounds the Obama administration, and this time it has to do with how many people actually ‘like’ and ‘follow’ Obama himself. New reports have surfaced that more than half of President Obama’s 36.9 million Twitter followers are fakes.
Only 20% of Obama’s Twitter followers are real people, according to the Internet research firm Status People, which checks for fake followers. Status People’s experts found that 53%, or 19.5 million, of the Twitter followers Obama reported belong to fake accounts. Meanwhile, we can actually see the pulse of what is important to the American people. There’s a reason that Anthony Gucciardi’s piece exposing ‘Constitution-free zones‘ has over 250,000 shares on Tumblr and several thousand on other social media platforms as well.
It seems that, instead of actually saying something worthwhile, politicians resort to deception. Vice President Joe Biden did almost as bad in the world of Twitter; around 46% of his Twitter followers are fake. First Lady Michelle Obama had a few more followers: Around 36% of the accounts that followed her were apparently fakes.
Based on Lies
So what is going on here? Is it a deliberate deception, a mistake, or simply confusion? In social media, the use of ‘bots’ and fake profiles is rampant. To make matters worse, it is very easy to set up a fake Twitter account or one that you don’t use. People set up such accounts for all sorts of reason. Unfortunately, services like Twitter count the fake accounts because it makes them sound good.
Politicians like Obama and Biden go along because it makes them seem more important and popular than they actually are. It makes it look they have followers when they don’t, both inside and outside of cyber space.
Twitter, of course, is the Internet-age equivalent of the balcony that dictators used to stand on to see the adoring masses or the adoring throngs that cheered Caesar in the coliseum. Caesar’s fans in the coliseum could expect to be rewarded with free bread if they cheered loud enough. Those who cheered on dictators such as Hitler and Stalin knew the secret police were watching and waiting to drag the unenthusiastic off to the concentration camp.
Status People’s research shows that modern politics and social media are nothing but plain, old-fashioned hype. The wonder is that we get taken in by chicanery not that it exists.
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