Via David Weigel, Rand's "spontaneous" surge of filibuster support (with pre-printed look-alike signs)
... Bump has a detailed breakdown of why Rand's second "filibuster" flopped, which includes this gem:
Paul's 11-hour speech on Wednesday in objection to the Patriot Act didn't seem to have the same resonance. The first time around, Twitter (the company) trumpeted that more than a million tweets about the filibuster -- many tagged with the aspirational hashtag #standwithrand -- were sent that day. This time, data from the Twitter analytics tool Topsy suggests a much more humble response on the Internet's social comments system, perhaps as few as 100,000 tweets in total.