I think anyone who is a lawyer (which I am not) has to believe in the ‘presumption of innocence’ until something is found unlawful on the balance of probabilities in the civil courts, or found criminal beyond reasonable doubt in the criminal courts.
CNN reported very recently ‘a curious spike for Mitt Romney’; it is reported thus,
“The Republican presidential nominee’s account on the site, which had been gaining followers at a clip of about 3,000 to 4,000 a day, appears to have gained more than 116,000 followers Friday and another 24,000 on Saturday. That’s according to Twitter Counter, an online tool that charts the number of followers that Twitter accounts have over time. Other tools show slightly different numbers and space the gains out differently over a three-day period. The spike was noticed by Zach Green, who runs 140elect.com, which monitors social-media activity in politics. He charted the growth as 23,926 new followers on Friday, 93,054 on Saturday and 25,432 more on Sunday.”
Political Scrapbook has reported a similar phenomenon for Louise Mensch:
“Westminster’s self-styled queen of social media has at least 17,000 fake Twitter followers. With her count going up massively overnight, a closer inspection reveals huge numbers of accounts with no tweets and profile information stolen from other users. With numerous junior Tories caught paying to boost their social media standing, Grant Shapps has been exposed for using a follow-spam bot and now Mensch has thousands of fake followers. But what a pity Louise can’t buy 17,000 users for Menshn.”
Lawyers should be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. They will also know that it is very difficult to prove causation in the law – just because something appears to have happened, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the cause of that event can be proved to have occurred. For example, I have to block regularly new followers (this is a regular event for me every few hours). I am not saying that I have to block as many as tens of thousands in a few days, but you see the point? I have never used this ‘tool’ though some of my friends or colleagues may have.
