Tory smear tactics are too obvious by far

Whose idea was it to buy thousands of Twitter followers for Owen Jones, in imitation of the tactic for which David Cameron was recently shown up?

Under the headline David Cameron has tens of thousands of Twitter followers who DON’T EXIST, yesterday’s (February 12) Daily Mirror told us: “David Cameron, who famously claimed “too many tweets make a t***”, faces Twitter shame as tens of thousands of his followers don’t exist.

“The Tory leader has 915,000 followers on the social network, which he joined five years ago.

“But media experts say 15% were ghost accounts – meaning about 137,000 of his Twitter friends are imaginary, while another 393,000 of his followers are deemed “inactive”.

“Celebs have previously been exposed for buying followers to boost their numbers, with online eBay scams arranging for 100,000 fake followers to flock to an account for just £25.”

Now let’s look at what happened to Owen Jones today.

Vox Political is not close to Mr Jones. The Chavs and The Establishment author has not acknowledged this blog’s existence and he never responds to our tweets. He does, however, strike this writer as an honourable person, so when he tweeted

150213jonesfollowers1

there was every reason to believe him.

Then, today (Feb 13), this happens:

150213jonesfollowers2

You see, this turned up on the pro-Tory Guido Fawkes blog today:

150213jonesfollowers3

What’s going on?

It seems clear that some Tory got wind that their leader’s fake followers were going to be outed in the media, so they started buying followers for a prominent Leftie instead, so they could point at him and say: “Look! Look! Those Labour boys are just as bad!”

How sad for them that Owen twigged what was going on, but in any case, two wrongs don’t make a right and some might say a British Prime Minister buying followers to make himself look popular is a lot “wronger” than anything a Leftie journo might do.

In any case, we know that Owen didn’t buy his fake followers.

Perhaps Guido would care to own up and tell us what the game is? How about it, Mr (real name) Staines?

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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7 Comments

  1. paulrutherford8 February 13, 2015 at 9:54 pm - Reply

    This reminds me of what happened to the Labour party ‘anti-bedroom tax pledge page’ a couple of weeks ago, when it was obviously hacked [badly].

    ‘Wings over that northern country’ [you know who], tweeted long and hard, joined within seconds, by lots of the cybernats about how Labour were faking signatures, attempting to suggest they had far more supporters than they do. Quite a number of people were duped into believing it.

    The hacked page contained a ‘script’ which scrolled through a number of ‘names’ of people who had, to the non-savvy, recently signed the page. Madonna, Beyonce, etc., up to 36 names randomly appeared. Refreshing the page brought the script back into play.

    However… the *total* number of signatories never changed in fact. It moved from 18,436 to 18,471 only. Refreshing the page brought the total back down to 18,436 again.

    Anyway… this story just reminded me of the Labour ‘hack’, which was strangely first mentioned by ‘Wings’.

    If I was a policeman, I’d…

    Coincidence?

    • Mike Sivier February 13, 2015 at 10:32 pm - Reply

      Funny you should mention that because some very obviously nationalist commenters on here tried to convince me that Labour had faked signatures on that petition. I wonder if they had anything to do with the hack, or if they were just duped by somebody who did?
      Would anybody like to confess/admit?
      I’ll dig out names later, if I can be bothered.

      • paulrutherford8 February 13, 2015 at 11:21 pm - Reply

        Haha!! They do try!

        It was interesting to see the relevant code displayed on the ‘feathered’ website being described as a blatantly inept Labour scam to dupe the great British public!

        I had one of them trying to convince me that the ‘code’ was meant to be there, and another couple trying to convince me that the code [in the blog] wasn’t the same as, but an example of, what was on the Labour page.

        I politely informed them I first learned programming some 40 years ago, recognised that the Labour page was ‘template-based’ like wordpress sites, and therefore [as with many ‘joomla’ sites], relatively easy to hack, especially if certain ‘htaccess’ files [etc], weren’t configured well. Then they began to back off, suggesting it may have been an inept Labour programmer ‘messing about’… so it *was* hacked then? I asked.

        Maybe, he replied.

        But ‘birdman’ did seem to have his blog prepared.

        Coincidence :)

  2. christopherblackmore February 13, 2015 at 11:49 pm - Reply

    I’m looking at this with my heavily secured PC, as one of the ads somebody has planted is a fake virus warning scam that thought my tablet was a phone….
    It’s getting very dirty, isn’t it?

  3. Chris February 14, 2015 at 3:37 am - Reply

    I’m so pleased that social media is backfiring for politics, because no-one is listening in the press or on TV news to electioneering either.

    People will not come out to vote in May.

    There will be a hung parliament that may not last 6 months.

    15 million did not vote in 2010, 9 million of them women.

    Even more people are displaying nil interest this time around.

    A petition is about to be presented to parliament, where Labour’s Miliband and Balls will have to formally say in parliament if Labour will revoke the Pension Bills 2010-2014 (flat rate pension) – obviously with the help of SNP, Plaid Cymru and DUP.

    This petition is gathering signatures by the thousands and has reached 40,000.

    It affects the 250,000 retiring next year, and the millions thereafter.

    The state pension is payable if remain in work or can retire as have other pension income, other than the lowest state pension of all rich nations bar poor Mexico (OECD) that is far, far below the breadline.

    See under my petition, in my WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT section, at, as to why the big petition and mine are sign or starve petitions:
    https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now

    • Mike Sivier February 14, 2015 at 1:44 pm - Reply

      People will come out to vote in May – they know this will be the most important election for years.
      But you may still be correct about a hung Parliament – especially if Labour enters any agreement with the SNP.
      Your statistics about the number of people who voted in 2010 are wrong – you have claimed twice as many didn’t vote as did, but in fact twice as many did vote as didn’t.
      So there’s no reason to believe you when you say more people are uninterested now.
      Your line about the petition is interesting and I shall look forward to seeing whether it actually gets anywhere.

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