Beware of Fake Legislative Twitter Accounts

This week I ran into an interesting phenomenon on Twitter. All of a sudden I had several new followers whose twitter account names were legislators’ names. When I visited their pages, their profiles included photos of them and showed that they were new pages with no new tweets. I started following them. The next day I saw a tweet from the New Haven Young Democrats saying that they had just blocked a bunch of fake followers who were claiming to be state representatives. After checking it out some more, I found that on several of those Twitter profile pages, these individuals had begun to tweet and were disclosing that they were in fact not the representatives. They were posting negative tweets about the legislators and their positions. Elected officials are not new to negative criticism nor should they be immune to discussing their positions on issues. But I find it interesting that this new tactic is being used. Candidates and elected officials will need to be more careful about searching not only what opponents are saying via legitimate social media means but also what is being said in their own names.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under CT politics, Interactive strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.