Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.

A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.

"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.

"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."

Notes the Times:

If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are "fake" or "inactive." So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... DeNFaOQmSp

“If you want to win, you’ve got to play this filthy, obscene game.”

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/24/r ... s-comment/

Science Chic wrote: Yeah, every account gets fake followers, and the more popular you are, the more fake followers you get - it's how the spammers and people hawking porn try to sneak their stuff through. They're really bad about misusing the hashtags to push their crap as well - you should've seen the smackdowns happening during the #LowerNorthForkFire, which I'm sure aren't unique to disasters.

I'd probably be considered a spammer too since I've yet to post anything with my personal Twitter account @ScientiaChic or even upload an avatar (sigh, I really need to clone myself and discover a mutant growth serum one of these days).

Science Chic wrote: Yeah, every account gets fake followers, and the more popular you are, the more fake followers you get - it's how the spammers and people hawking porn try to sneak their stuff through. They're really bad about misusing the hashtags to push their crap as well - you should've seen the smackdowns happening during the #LowerNorthForkFire, which I'm sure aren't unique to disasters.

I'd probably be considered a spammer too since I've yet to post anything with my personal Twitter account @ScientiaChic or even upload an avatar (sigh, I really need to clone myself and discover a mutant growth serum one of these days).