Rep. Steve Stockman (R – Texas) claims that President Obama’s operatives are spamming his colleagues on Capitol Hill with phony tweets in support of gun control.
The president has asked voters to tweet their congressional representative in support of gun control legislation.
Stockman is the lawmaker who threatened to impeach the president over implementing executive orders that would in his view infringe on the Second Amendment. He also made headlines by inviting outspoken gun rights advocate and rock musician Ted Nugent to the State of the Union address.
According to The Hill , Stockman assailed Obama’s gun control Twitter campaign in no uncertain terms:
“Obama’s anti-gun campaign is a fraud. Obama’s supporters are panicking and willing to do anything to create the appearance of popular support, even if it means trying to defraud Congress. I call upon the president to denounce this phony spam campaign.”
Stockman added that his office only received 16 tweets, all with the identical text, but 10 of them were computer-generated spambots. And only one of the 16 was from an actual constituent.
Twitchy has also reported that many of the #wedemandavote tweets that apparently are under the auspices of Obama’s Organizing for Action are from fake, newly created accounts.
Leaving aside this particular controversy, there is a cottage industry on the internet in the buying and selling of fake Twitter followers as opposed to legitimate followers for pennies on the dollar to artificiality inflate the perceiving popularity of an individual or business. As TheNextWeb webiste explains,
“The practice of buying Twitter followers (or Facebook fans, Instagram followers, etc.) is as old as social media itself, hinged on the archaic notion that quantity trumps all in the social interaction sphere. Some of the most well-known politicians and celebrities in our social strata are accused of puffing up their own numbers with these followers — often assessed as thoughtless and friendless robots keen on spamming Viagra ads — to make themselves seem more influential and dominant on the platform of choice.”
Stockman, a freshman lawmaker, represents Texas’ 35th Congressional district in the US House of Representatives. He served one term in Congress in the mid 1990s. In November 2012, he defeated his Democrat opponent by 44 points to return to Washington.