We are coming closer to a reality where no politician can ever spread well-known lies. Today, exclusively with TechCrunch, The Washington Post has launched a fully automated fact-checking program, Truth Teller, that displays “TRUE” or “FALSE” in real time next to video of politicians and pundits as they speak. Given the fact that almost one-fifth of registered voters still believe Obama is a Muslim, a tool to curb widespread myths could benefit our democracy. Check out a demo below:

The Knight Foundation-funded Truth Teller program automatically transcribes speeches and checks the statements against a database of well-known facts. For example, when House Speaker John Boehner claims that raising taxes on the top 2% would kill 700,000 jobs, Truth Teller pops a big red “FALSE” next to him, after cross-checking his statements against The Washington Post‘s own list of curated facts and other popular fact-checker databases.

For now, the early beta prototype has to be manually hand-fed some facts, and thus only works on topics it has been specifically designed to recognize. Since Congress has yet to pass a budget, and financial discussions are prone to widespread lies and misstatements, Truth Teller is being piloted on the issue of tax policy.

Eventually, The Washington Post‘s digital team hopes that Truth Teller can automatically draw from wisdom of the entire Internet and be available for citizens on their smartphones to fact-check politicians as they hold backyard BBQs during campaign season. Indeed, National Political Editor, Steven Ginsberg tells TechCrunch that he was inspired to pursue the project after witnessing Republican candidate Michele Bachmann spread lies to a small crowd of unsuspecting Iowans.

“You can imagine how that would change not just that scene but basically all of political discourse,” says Ginsberg, imagining if Iowans attending her talk were equipped with a smartphone version of Truth Teller. “If she’s lying to you and you say ‘Wait a second, you just lied to me,’ then you’ve got a whole different event than if she’s just talking.”

There’s definitely precedent for the way real time fact-checking can completely alter the outcome of discourse. During the 2012 President debates, CNN moderator, Candy Crowley, corrected Mitt Romney after he claimed that the President had not characterized an attack on the Libyan embassy in Benghazi as an “act of terror”. Immediately, Mitt Romney lost his momentum in the debate and it became a widely cited example in how Obama had verbally thumped Romney, turning the tide of public opinion after a disasterous first debate.

That said, the very same example highlights some hurdles that Truth Teller will need to overcome.

First, Crowley had to clarify her decision the next morning, after conservatives criticized her for misunderstanding that Romney accused Obama of not characterizing the attack as pre-medicated terrorist act, even if Obama did technically use the word “terror” in describing the event. In a highly nuanced and politically charged environment, even statements of fact are up to interpretation. If Truth Teller can only legitimately tackle unadulterated lies, the scope of its impact may be less than the Washington Post hopes for.

Second, political psychologists have long known a quirky fact about human belief: more information can often cause people to cling more stubbornly to blatant lies. Just last week, Mother Jones reported on another study that found that politically knowledgeable Republicans were especially prone to conspiracy theories. Journalists love to believe that the truth sets a democracy free–but human psychology humbles that philosophy.

The reality is, The Washington Post‘s* project takes us one step closer to a place where democracy has never been. It could very well have profound effects on the most malicious rumors that feed an ever-increasingly partisan political discourse. The upside to a major news network such as Fox or CNN implementing a polished version of Truth Teller is probably well worth the risk.

It’s one giant social experiment, with the hypothesis being that lies are one foundation of partisanship and ill-informed voting. Psychology and technical hurdles aside, I’m an optimist. I think this is the future of news, and, on the whole, the majority of reasonable (though ill-informed) Americans will enjoy being alerted to lies.

Democracy will be better off with more of the truth.

*I have been a non-paid contributed to The Washington Post in the past and may be again in the future. None of the members on this product work with me on editorial issues.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While it started in a Massachusetts dorm room, Facebook’s measure of presidential election mentions shows it’s become an international news carrier. There were 88.7 million election-related mentions outside the US, compared to 71.7 million state-side. “Vote” was the most popular word said on Facebook while to polls were open, while “Obama” took the top spot later in the day.

Other key stats from Facebook’s study included that men were more likely than women to talk politics in the run-up to the election, but that evened out as the polls opened. And while adults 35 to 54 and 55+ were most likely to discuss the debates, the youth spoke up on election day, with 25-34 year olds contributing the most mentions.

As for the most popular memes, Romney’s confession that he likes “Big Bird” despite being willing to cut funding to Sesame Street’s host channel PBS turned the term into the top pre-election day phrase. It narrowly beat out another Romney gaffe, “binders full of women”, though both got a surge of mentions on November 6th.

Facebook did its best to encourage discussion of the election, specifically asking people to “tell friends you’re voting” through notifications and home page banners. That apparently worked considering “vote” was the most popular term until the polls closed. 9.6 million total people told Facebook they voted using the button at the top of the news feed.

All those mentions and callouts don’t seem to have increased youth voter turnout, however. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement says that exit polls showed 49.3 percent of eligible voters age 18 to 29 cast their ballot. It expects that percentage to rise to 51 as the votes are counted — which is almost exactly the same as the voter turnout in 2008. That’s somewhat disappointing considering Facebook has grown from 145 million to 1 billion monthly users in the same time period.

Here’s the full lists of the most mentioned terms across Facebook throughout the day of the election:

Election Day (11/6), 7 AM PT
1. Vote – all forms: Go vote (top phrase) / voting / get out and vote / I voted / the right to vote
2. Election Day / Happy Election Day
3. Line
4. Polls
5. Voice
6. Halo
7. Eagles
8. Exercise your right to vote
9. Freedom
10. Our Country

Election Day (11/6), 2:30 PM PT
1. Vote / Voted / Votes
2. Obama
3. Election
4. Romney
5. Ballot
6. Polling
7. Ohio
8. Freedom
9. Campaign
10. Machines

Election Day (11/6), 6 PM PT
1. Obama
2. Romney
3. Win / Wins / Winning / Win the election
4. Results / Election Results
5. Close
6. Electoral / Electoral Map / Electoral Votes
7. Won
8. If Romney Wins
9. CNN
10. Coverage / Election Coverage

Election Day (11/6), 10 PM PT
1. Obama
2. 4 more years / 4 years
3. President / President Obama
4. Thank God
5. Won / Wins
6. America
7. Country / My Country / This Country
8. Yes
9. Ohio
10. Florida

[Image via Inside Facebook]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Barack Obama is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About This metric among politician pages. With 3,586,328 engagements this week and growing, the Obama campaign found itself far ahead of the Romney campaign just in time for the election.

The top 10 political pages saw PTAT growth between 15,827 and 791,987 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Barack Obama	3,586,328	+1,184,540	+791,987
2	Michele Bachmann	117,474	+9,690	+83,629
3	Sırrı Süreyya ÖNDER	103,356	+7,256	+44,618
4	Mike Huckabee	142,995	+10,702	+35,224
5	Gary Johnson	125,690	0	+27,979
6	Governor Jan Brewer	152,736	0	+27,069
7	AtaTürk Yolunda Ölürüm, S…	98,014	-10,752	+22,631
8	Governor Chris Christie	27,360	+1,215	+17,108
9	Scott Walker for Governor…	23,538	+1,354	+16,765
10	John Boehner	26,090	-823	+15,827

An AppData analysis of Facebook app usage shows Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s Facebook stores and donation apps have equal reach this month, but more people are using the Obama 2012 app than “Commit to Mitt” and similar apps on Romney’s page.

Both candidates have used Facebook extensively over the course of the campaign. Romney’s camp seemed more adept at running Facebook ads, as we’ve written about previously, but Obama’s team is now showing its strength in apps. The Obama 2012 app has taken advantage of the notifications beta to remind users to vote and contact friends in swing states. The app, which is accessible from Facebook and BarackObama.com, has 1.1 million monthly active users.

A similar app for Mitt Romney called Commit to Mitt has only 30,000 MAU. However, Romney’s page also features a Stand With Mitt app with 40,000 MAU and a Stand With Mitt Photo Upload app with 2,000 MAU. There may be some overlap in users of those three apps, but even if the totals were discrete, that’s still more than 1 million fewer monthly active users than Obama’s app has.

The candidates’ store and donate apps are tied for usage. The stores have 20,000 MAU each, and the donation apps each have 10,000 MAU.

Obama’s page has a email collection form with 4,000 MAU. There is no equivalent app on Romney’s page.

Romney has four other apps on his page that Obama doesn’t have. One is a pledge of support for American small businesses with 10,000 MAU. A petition app against Obama’s economic policies has 2,000 MAU, and a petition app against Obama’s heathcare policy has 1,000 MAU. Finally, there’s an app called “What’s Your Take” that asks users about issues, which has 900 monthly active users. Again, there may be overlap in users here, but even if there wasn’t, the totals are still less than the 1.1 million Obama has with his main app.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

“As a campaign we would not presume to know more than the collective intelligence and resources of the marketplace. We find the best firms in the country and glue them together to achieve our goals,” says Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney’s Digital Director. Without the luxury of a 4 year head start to build out it’s own campaign tools, Moffatt has won digital parity with the Obama juggernaut by partnering with the brightest Silicon Valley firms. For instance, though Obama has 4 times the number of Facebook fans, both Romney and Obama have similar levels of users actively commenting and sharing content online.

From partnering with Square to turn each Romney activist into a mobile fundraiser to getting Googlers to give up their famous 20% time for the campaign, Moffatt has leveraged Silicon Valley’s brightest minds, mostly for free, to give the once digital underdog some much-deserved tech cred.

Facebook And Google Power

“Republican candidate Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in Facebook engagement and new Likes,” wrote the social media blog, InsideFacebook, in a highly contentious post about the superiority of Romney’s social media prowess. Among many impressive Facebook strategies, Writer Brittany Darwell noticed that team Romney was exploiting a brand new feature, “sponsored” results, which displays Romney’s Facebook page when users look for “Obama” or “Democrat”.

But, it would be difficult for any brand, especially a national campaign, to so quickly exploit Facebook’s constantly changing ad system. Moffatt explains that it was the Facebook team, itself, that has been instrumental in giving the Romney campaign its edge. ”The Romney team has been quick to adopt new products and features and provide valuable feedback on how we might make those tools better,” says Jamie Smolski, a Facebook Politics & Government team member. The reason for Facebook’s close ties to Moffatt are simple: political campaigns are a delicious proving ground of data and experimentation. They have to move quick, reach every imaginable audience, and excite users’ most passionate beliefs.

A source close to Facebook tells us that Romney’s national campaign has provided “great” data for their foray into mobile. The mobile advertising cash-cow has famously eluded Facebook, even though over 500 million users check-in with cellphones each month. Moffatt tells us that he’s managed to get a whopping 10% click through rate on their targeted mobile advertising, ten times higher than Facebook’s average. It’s success like this that makes it a no-brainer for Facebook to tip Moffatt off to every imaginable upcoming feature.

Mobile users seem especially valuable to campaigns. “You know who the power mobile users of Facebook are?,” asks Moffatt, “stay-at-home moms.” Young, single voters have notoriously low turnout rates, so political campaigns salivate over the 35+ demographic that has both the time and technology-savvy to get their coveted friends engaged online.

And, to their credit, team Romney has had pitch-perfect timing funneling the impulsive civic rage of power moms into meaningful engagement. For instance, when Obama campaign advisor Hilary Rosen made headlines with the assertion that Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life,” Moffatt had Ann Romney respond on Twitter and Facebook. In just a few days, Moffett recalls, Ann Romney was overflowing with 85,000 engaged users. “In 48 hours, we created the single largest coalition, on the conservative side of the country, from scratch, on the only platform which could achieve this, which is Facebook.”

Facebook isn’t the only major player in Moffatt’s Silicon Valley brain trust. A few experts from Google’s website traffic analytics team have donated their valuable 20% time, a time allotted to all Google employees to work on experimental projects. While it’s difficult to know how the Google partnership has helped the Romney campaign (since unlike Facebook, Google activity is private), web search traffic could be even more valuable, as users searching for information are often actively looking to get involved in some way. “We never wanted to be that we’re not engaging the best minds to be successful,” concludes Moffatt.

Walking Billboards and Events

Silicon Valley partnerships have helped team Romney bolster two of the oldest forms of campaigning: merchandising and events. Mobile credit card reader, Square, built the campaign a custom Federal Elections Commission-compliant app that helped turn their Republican National Convention volunteers into an army of walking cashiers. Every t-shirt sold not only refills their coffers, but turns supporters into walking billboards. “Nothing is more about believing in a cause than when you are willing to wear a campaign’s merchandise on your body,” says Moffatt, “It’s a very public validation.”

So, how much money did Square help rake in? A knowledgeable campaign official tells TechCrunch that the official Romney pop-up stores “did well into the seven figures, during the convention.”

The same partnership-happy philosophy led Moffatt to team up with popular event organizing startup, Eventbrite. While Obama’s team has chosen to build out much of their own technology for offline engagement, Moffatt says that “we would rather go to someone who wakes up every morning and worries about event-ticketing.”

Recently released data from Eventbrite seems to confirm that the partnership has paid off: Republicans hold 42% more events than Democrats through Eventbrite (71% vs. 29%), Republican gatherings have an average of 14 more people (68 vs. 42) and 14% more events have been community-driven and free in battleground states, such as Colorado and Florida (77% vs. 63%).

It should be noted that Eventbrite represents some unknown fraction of the total political events nationwide, and the Democrats earn a lot more per event sale ($115 vs. $31, which likely decreases overall turnout). But, in fulfilling Romney’s need to go from winning the Republican primary to competing on a national scale with the Obama digital juggernaut, the Eventbrite partnership clearly helped them scale effectively.

The tired stereotype of Republican luddites just doesn’t seem to hold true anymore. After a sound defeat by Obama in 2008, Republicans made a concerted effort to hire and promote their ardent geeks. Romney was no exception: Moffatt was given access to fully integrate digital through the entire campaign, and hire a large team of power players, such as open-government champion, Matt Lira, to bring some much needed experimentation to the ever-evolving communication landscape.

The Romney campaign’s experience is an important lesson for businesses and government everywhere: give power to smart geeks. Invariably, your geekiest employees and their friends will astound you.

[Image Credit: Flicker User personaldemocracyformum]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

President Barack Obama managed to steal an impressive amount of Gov. Mitt Romney’s press coverage with a few, cheap social media tricks, including the most retweeted post of the convention. In comparison to the Republican National Convention’s all-out multi-million dollar conservative carnival, Obama made front page Google News with dramatically less effort and at no cost with three clever social media projects: answering questions from Reddit users for 30 minutes, tweeting “This seat’s taken” in response to Clint Eastwoods silly stand-up routine (51K retweets), and releasing the White House beer recipe. Sure, Obama has the spotlight advantage because he’s the President, but it goes to show that all the money and staging in the world can’t compete with cleverness.

The Republican National Convention, by any measure, was a breakout social media success, with 4 million total tweets and 14,000 tweets per second for Romney’s big speech. There were more tweets by the Tuesday of the convention than occurred during the entire 2008 convention (even though ratings were higher in 2008 with Palin). And, as well detail later, the Romney folks have an impressive digital media strategy.

But, team Obama managed to get an inordinate amount of traditional and online coverage with a few novelty social media actions. The first presidential “Ask Me Anything” on the popular news aggregate site, Reddit, racked up a whopping 5 million views for just 30 minutes of the President’s time.

Riding the wave of Clint Eastwood’s head-scratching conversation with an empty chair, Obama’s team dropped a pitch-perfect photo of him sitting in the commander-in-chief’s seat into the Twitterverse and watched the fireworks fly. The simple text + photo took the crown for the most retweeted post of the RNC.

To top it off, the White House assistant chef answered a much-anticipated call for the first official beer, which made the Google News front page.

You can make the case that social media and novelty news coverage don’t sway voters (and we have, extensively). Regardless, the lesson here is that social media experimentation and a pinch of wit are priceless.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For all the millions spent on the Republican National Convention, the entire operation could only speculate whether their keynote speeches had any meaningful impact. Until Facebook achieved near universal adoption among the voting class, brands had no reliable way to gage public opinion. Large surveys are subject to respondents’ notoriously bad memories, focus groups are too tiny to be nationally representative, and the Twitterverse is too liberal and young. However, Facebook’s recent experiment with topical chatter during the RNC may have just revealed the social network as the best known barometer of national buzz.

“During Ann Romney’s speech, the entire map of women talking from coast to coast turned bright red,” recalls CNN producer Michelle Jaconi, who oversaw a Facebook partnership that visualizes political social chatter across a map of the US. While Facebook doesn’t measure the sentiment of opinion, a giant spike in female chatter is the best indication we’ve ever had that team Romney hit the bullseye.

It’d be nearly impossible to ascertain how women actually felt about Ann Romney’s speech using traditional methods. Hindsight survey’s asking respondents how they felt about a speech over the phone are subject to participant’s notoriously bad memories. As we’ve noted before, many people can’t remember what they ate for breakfast, or remember monumental life events; so, they certainly wouldn’t be better at reflecting how they felt during a speech days earlier.

The second-best alternative is a real-time focus group, which measures opinion while groups of potential voters watch a replay of the speech. Unfortunately, focus groups are rife with problems: bored participants rush to judgement, are heavily influenced by the latent actions of the research director and their surrounding peers, and, are by nature, too tiny to be representative of the national population.

Twitter attempted to reveal national sentiment with its political index, which measures the volume of positive and negative tweets related to each presidential hopeful. But, research has shown that the modern state of statistical science just doesn’t know how to accurately measure opinion through the (heavily biased) Twitterverse. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello.

Facebook though, has achieved near universal adoption in the United States. According to Pew, 70% of the Republican’s sweet-spot 35-49 demographic use social networks (and nearly all of them use Facebook).

Even if the Facebook chatter wasn’t all positive, the campaign now knows that it teed up enough users in the chosen demographic to mobilize passionate supporters. “You know who the power mobile users of Facebook are?” Ronmey’s Digital Director, Zac Moffatt asks, “stay-at-home moms.” With Facebook, Moffatt can target them with specific calls to action.

And, the Romney campaign has a history of channeling female engagement at the perfect time. Earlier in the year, when Obama campaign advisor Hilary Rosen made the unfortunate claim that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life,” Moffatt had Ann Romney respond on Twitter and Facebook. In 5 days, Moffett recalls, Ann Romney had 85K people engaging with her online. “In 48 hours, we created the single largest coalition, on the conservative side of the country, from scratch, on the only platform which could achieve this, which is Facebook.”

CNN’s experiment with Facebook was a proving ground for the social network as a goldmine in demographic-specific buzz. After the election, the benefits are sure to spill over into industry marketing. Ford, for instance, would certainly want to know if a Superbowl ad lit up teenage chatter–as would any national brand. Where the volume of chatter matters more than sentiment, it’s hard to imagine a better data source than Facebook. So, brands, put your ear to Facebook’s grindstone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Republican candidate Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in Facebook engagement and new Likes, in part because of a strong social ad campaign that takes advantage of the latest opportunities on Facebook.

Obama might have the most Facebook fans of any politician — approaching 28 million — but the average number of interactions per day on his page has not been much higher than on Romney’s page, which passed 5 million Likes this weekend. There are likely several factors at play here. Larger pages routinely have a lower percentage of engaged users compared to pages with fewer Likes. New fans are more likely to see page posts than people who have Liked the page for a while, so Obama might not be reaching much of his audience as Romney currently is.

But beyond these inherent disadvantages, the Democratic campaign doesn’t seem to be taking the right steps to maximize its impact on Facebook. It’s posting less frequently and seems to be running fewer social ads.

Romney’s team, on the other hand, is using all the newest Facebook marketing and advertising features. In addition to posting more than four times per day on average, they’re running Sponsored Results so that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan show up in the results when users search for “Obama,” “Biden,” “Democrats,” “Republicans” and other political pages. This is something that only became available last week. The Republican campaign is also running page post ads and Sponsored Stories, including in the News Feed. All these ads drive users to Romney and Paul’s Facebook pages, leading to more new Likes and a higher People Talking About This count.

Obama’s campaign seems to have been only running traditional ads in the sidebar. This type of ad, which leads off-Facebook and does not have a Like button or social context, is known among social marketers as the worst performing unit on Facebook. Not only do these ads cost more and have lower average clickthrough rates than others on the social network, when users do notice and interact with them, there is no social amplification of this action. Users’ friends won’t see that they Liked the page or engaged with a post because there are no calls to action from the ad to do these things.

However, with Romney’s social ads, each paid action can result in additional exposure. For example, users might see that their friends claimed an offer or shared a photo. And each new page Like opens up more of an audience to target with Sponsored Stories, which only appear to friends of fans.

In 2008, many pointed to Obama’s use of digital and social platforms as a key factor of his success. But Facebook moves fast, and his team doesn’t seem to be as up to date as the Republicans are this time around. The campaign might be too reliant on organic activity, which as many marketers are discovering, isn’t necessarily enough to succeed on Facebook anymore.

Follow the candidates’ Facebook progress using our Election Tracker and PageData tools.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Twitter just announced the launch of its Twitter Political Index. This index, says Twitter, is “a daily measurement of Twitter users’ feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.” Every day, twitter will evaluate and weigh the sentiment of tweets mentioning both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney relative to every other message that passes through Twitter’s systems. The system then calculates a score for both candidates. Currently Obama‘s score is 34 (and trending down) and Romney, whose follower count on Twitter may be somewhat inflated, is at 25 (and trending up a bit). The Twitter Political Index will be updated every day at 8pm ET.

Twitter, of course, has been used to study political sentiment for quite a while not and the company even has its own Government & Politics team to analyze this data and assist third parties with their own efforts. For this project, however, Twitter also partnered with the data analysts at Topsy, as well as polling firms The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research. USA Today will also use Twitter’s election meter in its coverage of the ongoing presidential campaign.

According to Twitter, its own data generally shows the same trends as Gallup‘s approval ratings surveys and frequently “hints” at “where the poll numbers are headed.”  There is some evidence, however, that “the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated.” That study, however, mostly looked as message volume while Twitter’s barometer focuses on sentiment analysis.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It looks like someone made the colossally silly decision to buy Mitt Romney Twitter followers. Earlier this month, Romney saw an implausible spike of 150,000 Twitter followers, and many of these likely fake accounts had less than 2 followers, according to some crack reporting by The Atlantic. It is unknown whether the purchase was made by someone at Camp Romney, a clueless PR flack, or a conspirator trying to make him look bad. Regardless, fibbing politicians are a serious affront to democracy, and someone owes the American people an explanation.

Up until Romney’s Twitter spike, his account had been growing at a slow-but-steady 3,500 followers a day, prompting widespread speculation of fraud after the surge occurred in a few weeks ago.

To test whether or not the media had unearthed something legitimate, or were just aching for a cheap corruption story, The Atlantic performed a simple statistical analysis on Romney’s new followers to test if they somehow differed from both Barack Obama’s followers.

Humans typically have more followers than automated accounts, since they Tweet more interesting information and they share similar interests with other netizens. More sophisticated automated accounts will boost their follower account by following one another, but they do so in a (statistically) recognizable way, and can be ferreted out by comparing the way humans cluster together. The study concluded:

“The median number of followers for Romney’s new followers was 5, whereas the median for the comparison group was 27. This represents a stark, and statistically significant difference… the p-value on this was 0.0000.”

The “p-value”, if readers recall from their college Statistics class, is how likely an event could have happened by chance. A coin flipping heads has a p-value of 0.5, for instance. A p-value of <0.0000 means that Romney is about as likely to get hit by a meteor as his is to get 150,000 followers in a few days.

Earlier in the campaign, Romney’s fellow Republican colleague, Newt Gingrich, got in hot water for buying Twitter popularity. “Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater,” a staffer admitted to Gawker.

Now, we’ve argued that social media is an over-hyped asset for political campaigns. If no one under the age of 30 had voted for Obama in 2008, he still would have won every state but two. The fact that Obama has 17 million more followers than Romney is probably inconsequential. But, truthfulness from someone who could be the most powerful man in the world is important. Zach Moffatt, Romney’s otherwise impressive digital director, has denied that the campaign is involved in inflating its Twitter account.

But, someone is buying followers. It’d be a win for the Romney campaign and for the integrity of the office of the President if they were honest about who is responsible.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch