Twitter follower updates lag like YouTube views. I expect this kind of political finger pointing will continue and gather steam on HN until the election. If Obama is re-elected then it will essentially stop, but if Romney is elected it will continue up for the next four years. This site is like r/technology-lite in many ways.

I see two interesting aspects of the issue: (1) the astounding value in affecting perceptions of one's popularity and (2) the implementation schemes for #1. Whether Romney/Obama/whomever took any particular action is only a concrete instance upon which to consider these two ideas.

I'm confused, who's picking sides? I just read an article about twitter followers based on observable statistics. Why are you talking about hypothetical astroturfing, and how does that relate to or discredit the article?

The astroturfing seems so obvious (rapid ramp-up) that I had to wonder if Romney's campaign was actually behind it. Why not pay a little more to do a good job -- at a minimum, ramp-up over time. Two possibilities (among many, I suppose) are that an Obama supporter paid for the fake followers so that a story could be planted about Romney's deceptive tactics. Another possibility is that a fake user farm set-up its fakes to follow a few random, high-profile users to make the fakes seem more legit. If this was the case, why choose Romney but not Obama? Based solely on the data, we can't know what actually happened, but it doesn't seem like the article's conclusion was drawn after exploring alternate possibilities and finding reasons to dismiss them.