Rick Perry's Campaign Caught Astroturfing on Twitter

[Ian David]

Rick Perry's Campaign Caught Astroturfing on Twitter

by: Phillip Martin
Sat Oct 02, 2010 at 00:50 PM CDT

Exactly how many of Rick Perry's followers on Twitter are make believe?

On Friday, the Rick Perry campaign was outed for astroturfing on Twitter. Astroturfing is creating a fake account to lie about who you are. For example, imagine I created an account and called myself "RachelGriffin85" when clearly, my name is Phillip Martin, then I used this fake account "RachelGriffin85" to spread lies and have my friends help me spread lies about a political opponent. That practice is known as "astroturfing."

Rick Perry's campaign was caught astroturfing on Twitter. From the Statesman, "On Twitter, it's not always easy to tell who's a part of the campaign":

Noam Krig, a Texas State University alumnus who was a social media intern for the Texans for Rick Perry campaign, has been posting a heavy stream of pro-Perry and anti-White links on a Twitter account at twitter.com/weRaustin, an account he's run for at least a year. He also appears to be behind other Texas city accounts like weRhouston and weRsanantonio.

But it's not so easy to figure out; the accounts list no name and offer no link to an affiliated website that would identify Krig as their owner.

Perry's campaign has insisted that Krig is just a volunteer and no longer works with the campaign. Yet, only ten days ago he was checking in on Gowalla at the Rick Perry campaign headquarters.



More:
http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/10824/rick-perrys-campaign-caught-astroturfing-on-twitter