Well, There He Goes Again . . . .
Remember the POTUS Twitter account scandal? You know, where nearly 53% of the followers of the Twitter account belonging to the POTUS were determined to be something other than real people – e.g., artificial entities there for no other reason than to puff up the numbers and create an “echo chamber” to make it appear the account was more popular than it really was?
To borrow a famous phrase: “There he goes again”.
It seems there is an ObamaCare Facebook page. And, yeah – you guessed it. Just like the POTUS’s Twitter account, it’s also little more than an echo chamber driven by deception.
The ObamaCare Facebook page has somewhere around 227k comments since September 2012. Sounds good, right? Well, yeah, it does.
It does until you check into what’s actually going on a little more closely. When you do that, you find that about 60% of those comments originated from a set of no more than 100 distinct Facebook profiles.
Yep: 100 Facebook profiles made about 136,000 of the roughly 237,000 comments on to the ObamaCare Facebook site. That’s certainly a “broad cross-section” of public opinion, isn’t it?
But wait, it gets even better when you dig a bit deeper. That’s the upper estimate for the number of actual people making those 136,000 comments. Multiple Facebook profiles appear to be in use. Indications are that many (if not most or all) human owning one of those 100 Facebook profiles has multiple Facebook profiles – 3 or 4 profiles seems to be common.
They’ve already found one such frequent commenter who admits to having 4 Facebook profiles in order to “make her voice heard better” (or words to that effect). I’m sure she’s not the only one – even Lone Ranger had Tonto, Silver, and Scout with him.
Another high-volume commenter isn’t even American; she’s from Canada. Several seem to comment only during working hours – but not on weekends. Hmm.
And since word got out that people were watching this, some formerly high-activity Facebook profiles commenting on the ObamaCare Facebook site have “magically” disappeared. So we may be talking about a small group of 25 and 40 actual people making 60% of those roughly 227,000 comments.
Oh, and that ObamaCare Facebook page? It’s also done by Organizing for Action – the same folks that did the POTUS’s Twitter account. Really makes you go, “Hmm” – doesn’t it?
The Washington Times has a decent article on this little issue. It’s a bit long, but it’s IMO well worth a read.
Yeah, your leg’s getting wet again. And I don’t think it’s rain this time, either.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Reality Check
Even if I was getting paid for it, still think I’d have better things to do than generate 40,000 facebook comments about how great Obamacare is(n’t).
I’ll try to find a link as soon as I get out from under an avalanche of work, but various companies have written software that ‘acts like’ real people, posting comments on blogs, Facebook pages, etc., all with slight variants to give the illusion of real people.
Given that there are people who write serial killers in prison, I’m quite sure you can find a few nutjobs to vocally support anything (*), but I’d honestly be very surprised if those comments were all generated by real people.
(*) I’m not comparing the ACA to serial killers. I know plenty of people for whom it’s been a godsend – not because it gave filthy hipsters something to embrace, but because it lets them change jobs without worrying about the tangled web of insurance, pre-existing conditions, etc.
Maybe All Points Logistics and FirsTech might employ this tactic to get their names out there.