Hillary Clinton revealed to have over a million fake Twitter followers - more than any other presidential hopeful
- Hillary Clinton has over one million fake Twitter followers, more than any other presidential hopeful
- Donald Trump also has more than one million fake followers, but a higher percentage of real followers on the social media platform
- Almost half of Joe Biden's followers are fake
- Among those running for president, Bernie Sanders has the highest percentage of real followers with 92%
- Fake followers are a 'mix of inactive Twitter users , completely fake users that are created for the sole purpose of following people, and spam bots'
- Clinton and Trump still have far more followers than anyone else running for president
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are not polling well when it comes to their social media fans.
An analysis of the pair's Twitter accounts has revealed that over one million of Clinton's followers are fake, while only 53% of Biden's social media fans are real.
Also polling poorly is Donald Trump, who like Clinton has over one million fake followers.
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Tough break: Hillary Clinton (above in Iowa on Wednesday) has over one million fake Twitter followers, more than any other presidential hopeful
Yahoo Tech analyzed the Twitter accounts of the presidential hopefuls, and while Clinton and Trump both have the highest number of fake followers, their percentage of real followers is comparatively good at 66% and 69% respectively.
Those two candidates also have far more followers than anyone else running for president.
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Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush meanwhile may not have as many followers, but they have strong support with 92% of Sanders' Twitter followers and 89% of Bush's followers being reported as real.
Fake Twitter followers are a 'mix of inactive Twitter users (who signed up but never log on), completely fake users that are created for the sole purpose of following people, and spam bots that are programmatically set up to tweet ads and malicious content,' according to TwitterAudit co-founder David Caplan.
According to the site, President Barack Obama has almost 40million fake followers compared to 23million real ones, while Michelle Obama is doing much better with 60% of her followers being real.
'For large accounts (1 million+ followers), the percentage of real followers sometimes tends towards 50%,' said Caplan.
'This doesn’t necessarily mean the other 50% are fake. It’s more likely that many users are just inactive or use Twitter to occasionally read tweets. For large accounts, if the score is 60% (real followers) then I’d say that is a pretty good score.'
He then added; 'Fake followers aren’t inherently bad, they are just a dishonest form of using social media. They can be leveraged to inflate someone’s reputation.
People will most likely follow someone who already has many followers, so buying followers is a way to boost your follower count in the future.
Fake followers can also be used to commit fraud in the sense that you can inflate the value of your Twitter account for advertising purposes without creating any real value.'
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