Hey Mitten, I'll Follow You after the Fuckin Check Clears!

I will never have a twitter account, unless, of course, Mittens internet espionage agency notices this post and caves into my demands to be paid off...hmmmm...let's see, I think $750,000 dollars is a reasonable figure...then heck, I'll be his Twitter follower.  You see, I don't live in the United States of America and I found it very interesting that today, I have been getting one email notification after another of requests from twitter to verify different accounts linked to my email address. All were with very strange names. This never happened before and of course, if you don't actually have a twitter account, you cannot actually send them an complaining email, because to contact twitter, you have to have a twitter account....I found this interesting because just today, I learned that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is apparently buying Twitter followers to inflate his popularity in social media. The graph from 140Elect.com looks like a hockey stick:


For comparison, a graph of Barack Obama’s new followers in the same time period (viaTwitter Counter) shows steady growth with no spikes:


Here’s Romney’s profile page: Mitt Romney (MittRomney) on Twitter.

Check the number of followers, then watch as it increases by a hundred or so every time you reload the page. If you look at all these followers, they seem to have major trouble with spelling simple English words, have names that sometimes seem to be random assortments of syllables, and have no (or very few) followers themselves.

At the current rate, he’s adding about 10,000 followers every hour.

Yes, you can buy Twitter followers; in fact, it’s become a thriving business.

Why might the Romney campaign think it’s a good idea to shell out Rmoney to artificially pump up their numbers? Well, I’m no mind-reader, but I suspect this comparison could have something to do with it:



By the way, in the few minutes it took me to grab the screenshot of Romney’s profile and post this article, his follower count rose by more than a thousand. He’s got a long way to go to catch up with Obama, but plenty of cash to spend.
UPDATE:
The Romney campaign denies it:
Andrew Kaczynski@BuzzFeedAndrew

But, hell, Mittens has the bucks and his buddy Sheldon Adelson who is selling the USA to the Chinese Mafia has pledged "unlimited bucks" to get his boy, der Mittsler, elected...so if the USA is going to hell in a handbasket...I want my share of the big bucks if they want me to open a twitter account...I mean...