Updated: @narendramodi Has More “Fake” Than “Real” Followers: TwitterAudit Data
An insider of BJP who wished to remain anonymous began, “We do not accept results of such reports when its credibility is unproven nor can we pay attention to every Harry coming out with a report that is seemingly so biased.”
Founded in 2012, TwitterAudit works by taking a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculating a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. These scores are used to determine whether any given user is real or fake.
These audits were carried less than a month back exclusively for BWDisrupt. According to TwitterAudit, a green thumbs up means there are more real followers; an orange thumbs up means the algorithm finds it hard to decide how many are real and fake; red means there are definitely more fake followers than real ones.
Responding to this report a Twitter spokesperson said, "While we will not comment on the results of this dubious report, we can confirm that it is not officially from Twitter. In general, fake followers are covered by our Spam Policy located here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311. Any account that is reported to us as Spam will be reviewed and can be suspended/terminated if found violating our Spam Policy."
While TwitterAudit accepts that the scoring method is not perfect, it is a relatively reliable indicator of how the account holder has acquired their Twitter followers. TwitterAudit further says their audit is a good way to find out if, “someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”
Fake followers, and bots are an epidemic on Twitter and online at large and can potentially play a role in affecting public opinion close to elections. The UK media outlet, The Telegraph had run a similar audit on the US presidential candidates using TwitterAudit to find out who had the most fake followers. In the article appearing on 11th of February, 2016 it was revealed that Hillary Clinton had 41 percent fake followers while Trump had 36 percent fake followers.
Analyst from US and Bangalore based bot detection startup, ShieldSquare writes, “It is a known fact that bots make up 50 percent of the internet traffic…According to ShieldSquare, 30 percent of the total Web traffic a popular online media site receives is from comment spam.”
TwitterAudit is US based and is not affiliated with Twitter in any way. It was cofounded by David Caplan, who refers to himself as a hacker, scientist and a startup addict.
Speaking on the issue Caplan was cited by the Democracy Chronicles as saying, “Fake 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.”
Caplan was further cited, “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.”
With that said, above are the facts for the top 12 Twitter accounts from India according to TwitterCounter. Be shocked away.
