This Week in Politics & Digital: Super Committees & Fake Follo

**Waqas** · August 27, 2011

The dust has finally settled around the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, the latest barometer on which Republican will go head-to-head with President Barack Obama. In the brief lull, the country is still coming to terms with its financial woes and the repercussions of the debt downgrade.

This week we take a look at the debt super-committee’s digital plans and find out if Newt Gingrich has any human fans. We’ve even got some mobile apps to let you mess around with President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush. This is the Week in Politics & Digital.

Debt Super Committee to Launch Crowdsourcing Website

Earlier this month, the U.S. government voted to raise the debt ceiling, thereby preventing the country from defaulting on its increasing debt. That decision, however, only forestalled the more serious act of massively reducing the budget.

Sensing that mass bickering between the aisles wasn’t going to work, the White House created a bipartisan “Super Committee” to hammer out the difficult details. Although the group is yet to meet, co-chairs Sen. Patty Murray, D.-Wash., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R.-Texas, said they are busy both assembling the team and planning a website to gather public input on how best to cut the budget, reported the LA Times.

The Super Committee only has until November 23 to recommend a plan to cut $1.5 trillion over the next decade. The plan will then go to Congress for a vote by December 23.

Gingrich’s Followers are Not All Robots

Despite skepticism thrown on former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich for supposedly boosting his Twitter followers with fake accounts, an exclusive study for Mashable has vindicated Gingrich.

Gingrich claimed the large amount of inactive followers was due to his brief stint on Twitter’s “Suggested User List.” We asked Topsy, a social media search company, to go through the followers of every politician on the List to determine if Gingrich’s claim was verifiable. Well, the results show all the politicians on the List have similar numbers of inactive or fake-looking accounts.

â€œThe followers of SUL politicians are not very active on Twitter,â€ says Rishab Ghosh, co-founder of Topsy. â€œBetween 74% and 90% of their followers havenâ€™t tweeted in the past month, and 30% to 41% have never tweeted at all.â€

Gingrich’s users may still be inactive but there’s now little evidence that he bought or artificially boosted his numbers.

Talk Like a President

You can finally make President Obama or President Bush say whatever you want, thanks to two free apps from iSpeech. The text-to-speech company also has a speech-to-speech version that costs $2.99.

Whether you wish Obama was tougher on his critics or just wish the President could record your voicemail, you now can literally put your words into his, or Bush’s, mouth.

Image courtesy of Flickr, jeannerene, Francisco Diez, Gage Skidmore

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