President Obama’s Fake Twitter Followers Outnumber Mitt Romney’s Total Followers 6 to 1

It’s pretty safe to say that everyone on Twitter is followed by at least a few fake accounts. We always knew that bots ran rampant on the site, but recent studies into the buying and selling of ...
President Obama’s Fake Twitter Followers Outnumber Mitt Romney’s Total Followers 6 to 1
Written by Josh Wolford
  • It’s pretty safe to say that everyone on Twitter is followed by at least a few fake accounts. We always knew that bots ran rampant on the site, but recent studies into the buying and selling of fake Twitter followers has put a spotlight on just how serious the problem really is.

    Plus, there was that whole thing about Mitt Romney’s follower count making a suspicious 100K+ jump overnight.

    But in terms of sheer volume, President Obama dwarfs the presumptive Republican nominee in fake followers. A new tool from Status People allows anyone to look at the breakdown of followers of any Twitter users to see how many are “fake,” “inactive,” and “good.” And using that tool, we can see that 31% of President Obama’s followers are deemed fake. Since Obama has around 18.8 million followers, we can calculate that just shy of 6 million of them are fake.

    Mitt Romney, on the other hand, only has 900,000 followers total. Only 16% of those are fake, according to the tool. That amounts to around 144,000 phantom followers.

    And these figures don’t even take into account the “inactive” percentages, which total 39% for the President and 31% for Romney. Any number of those “Inactive” users could be fake.

    Really, it all comes down to how many followers you have. The more you have, the bigger the percentage of fakes you have as well. We recently crunched the numbers and found that, on average, over 27% of the top ten Twitter accounts’ followers are fake. That means that although Mitt Romney was in the news recently due to speculation that his campaign had bought over a hundred thousand followers overnight, he’s far from the only Twitter user to have a fake follower problem.

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