In a world where dominating social media essentially means the same as dominating the general populous, it’s no wonder that we’ve been seeing an increasing amount of people attempt to game social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Today’s example comes from Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s Twitter account, which is under scrutiny today by security firm Barracuda Labs. According to Barracuda Labs, over 15% of everyone who follows Mitt Romney’s official Twitter account are actually fake accounts paid for by a a group – perhaps by even the Romney campaign itself.

The news comes after Mitt Romney’s account gathered just over 116,922 new followers in a single 24-hour period, which is an extraordinarily large amount even for someone of near celebrity status – and a majority of those accounts were seemingly set up within the previous couple of days, specifically for this purpose. These accounts aren’t tweeting, aren’t following many other users, and some of them have even already been suspended by Twitter.

Clearly, this is a huge issue that Twitter will have to work to solve. Twitter has always been notoriously lax on spam accounts and the like, but that will have to change if Twitter wants to continue to be taken seriously in real world matters such as this.

Via: ArsTechnica
Source: Barracuda Labs