By the way, here are the aforementioned photos from the aforementioned stream cleaning workshop.
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| City of Raleigh Stream Monitoring Workshop |
Follow-Up
There are 521 posts filed in Follow-Up (this is page 26 of 53).
More Romney hacking victims come forward
Having given up on Facebook’s less-than-ideal search box, I thought to use the Google to find more unwitting Mitt Romney fans. It turns out there are a lot of them. (Click here to see an earlier list of responses.)
An example:
A friend from High School let me know that on the side-ads bar, it said that I ‘like’ Mitt Romney! Imagine that?!?!? I DO NOT LIKE MITT ROMNEY AND I HATE THAT THE FB SOFTWARE HAS DONE THAT. I WILL SUE FOR DAMAGES IF I EVER SEE IT! I HAVE A TEAM OF LAWYERS AND THIS IS NOT OVER!
…and this
My page was somehow updated to show I liked Mitt Romney, which I certainly do not. There was no entry in my activity log. I had to go to his page to ‘unlike’ it. There is no indication that it was an account level hack.
‘Hacked by Mitt Romney’ Facebook page
Thinking that Facebook just might be a good place to find other Facebook users who’ve been profile slammed (i.e. hacked) by Mitt Romney’s campaign, I created a Facebook page called (wait for it) … Hacked By Mitt Romney! We’ll see if it gains any attention.
I went through a ridiculous number of naming attempts before Facebook would let me choose the one I chose. Also, the “Facebook name” (the custom URL of http://www.facebook.com/MittYouDidntBuildThat) was also nearly impossible to choose. A number of obvious choices were already taken. Nothing with Romney in the name would be accepted. I’ve got screenshots of this and will share these when I get more time today.
More stories of Romney’s rise in Facebook
Here are a few links to what people are saying about Mitt Romney’s Facebook page.
26 April – Big Think – Obama vs. Romney on Facebook:
… while Romney is getting a higher rate of sharing from his fans than the president, Obama’s fans have shared his posts 2.24 times more often in absolute numbers. Add this to the fact that Obama’s messages are directly delivered to more than 24,000,000 fans than Romney’s, and it is clear to see that Obama is dominating Facebook so far in this campaign.
20 June – Mashable – Romney gains speed on Facebook:
According to data from both Facebook and SocialBakers.com, Romney has seen a swell in popularity recently. From June 11 to 17, one of his strongest weeks yet, he gained more than 71,000 new fans; according to Facebook, June 10 was his most popular day ever.
Meanwhile, President Obama gained about 77,000 new fans during the same time period. While that is a greater number of fans, it is down from previous weeks, and in the last month, Obama has only had a 1.7% increase in fans, whereas Romney has had a 10.8% increase.
Does Romney Buy his Facebook Fans?
Two weeks ago, ZoomSphere, a company that analyizes Facebook statistics, identified many fake accounts being added to Romney’s Facebook page. I agree that this data looks very, very suspect.
Today you could see that Mitt Romney crossed the border of 4.000.000 fans on his fan page on Facebook. This is a great milestone for each politician.
Here we can see that around 34% fans of Mitt Romney have only couple of their own fans. It is very unusual and suspicious.
Similarly, a large proportion of such fans is usually an indicator of their shopping over the dubious services.
Check out ZoomSphere.com’s day-to-day tracking of Mitt Romney’s page here.
Other Facebook users report Romney profile slamming
Other Facebook users have been reporting that their Facebook accounts were signed up for Mitt Romney’s Facebook page without their permission. Here are a few quotes from the Facebook help page topic:
“This happened to me, as well.”
“Happened to me too i wouldnt piss on that Douchenozzels shoes if his feet were on fire”
“That keeps happening to me, not only with the Mitt Romney page, but with several other pages–mostly commercial things like Amazon and Target, whose pages I never even visited.”
Here are a few from another Facebook help page on the topic:
“Betcha this year’s tax return’s will show Mitt Romney’s the biggest shareholder in Facebook. My page is flooded with his face”.
“My facebook is also flooded wiyh Mitt Romney posts, how can we rid of them.”
I’ve heard from friends of friends who have had this happen to them. I’ll see if I can get quotes from them, too.
Also, I’m starting to see this topic show up on message boards around the Internet. Word is slowly starting to get around.
Update 12:10 PM: Here’s another response on the Centrist Word blog:
“I had this happen to me, and as an outspoken Obama supporter, I was horrified. A friend spotted it on Facebook and texted a screen shot to me. A whole new low in political campaigning.”
Chart reveals unusual patterns in Romney’s Facebook popularity
I discovered a company called Inside Facebook which has been tracking the popularity of the Presidential candidates’ Facebook pages.
Take a look at the graph above. Obama’s growth has been extremely predictable and steady, while Romney’s has been all over the place. It shows extreme swings. Now, I don’t know if waves of actual Romney supporters are getting on board his train or if someone’s padding his numbers on his behalf but the stark difference in the two candidates’ patterns does raise questions.
Profile slamming
I was thinking that there isn’t much out there that describes what I believe Mitt Romney’s campaign (or one of its allies) is doing to surreptitiously set Facebook accounts to like the campaign’s page. Is it account hijacking? Hacking? Vandalism? What do you call it?
Then I recalled telephone slamming, the practice where unscrupulous telephone companies steals the customer of another telephone company by switching that customer’s long distance provider without their knowledge or consent. This happened to a company I once worked for and stunned me in its audacity.
I think that manipulating someone’s social media profile without their permission is similar in some ways to telephone slamming. Since no one else seems to have come up with a name for this practice, I will call it “profile slamming.”
Barracuda Labs looks at Romney’s Twitter numbers
From Barracuda Labs
Barracuda Labs, the highly-respected spam-filtering company, wrote up a superb analysis of Mitt Romney’s Twitter numbers. You should read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
Most interestingly, during our investigation, Republican nominee for US President Mitt Romney has been scrutinized recently for his abnormal increase in new followers (@mittromney), indicating that these followers had been purchased in the same way as the Dealers/Abuser scenario from our study. We do note that these followers could have been purchased by either himself, his associates or by his opponents. Particularly, on July 21st, 2012, his follower number went from 673,002 to 789,924, representing a gain of 116,922 or 17%.
In one day – boom! – his follower numbers grow an astounding 17 percent!
Continue reading
More stories of Romney fudging social media
FastCompany recently warned against the temptation of buying fake Twitter followers, pointing to a service called StatusPeople which can ferret out fakes. Says the article:
Do a quick Google search for “Mitt Romney Twitter Followers” and you’ll find dozens of articles discussing how his follower numbers grew suspiciously. Security firm Barracuda Labs created an infographic based on its research breaking down Romney’s newfound Twitter fame, sharing that one in four of Romney’s new Twitter accounts had never sent a single tweet. No matter how the presidential candidate got these new followers, it doesn’t look good from the outside (although his Faker Score is currently sitting pretty at just 12% of 839,719 followers).