A Third of Hillary’s Twitter Followers are FAKE!

These stats seem to be about all the proof I need that Twitter is reflective of real life, at least when it comes to politicians:

Yahoo Tech has uncovered an interesting statistic: a full 1 million (or one third) of Hillary’s ‘apparent’ Twitter followers are fake! To be fair, Joe Biden’s stats are worse, as only 53% of his “followers” are from real accounts (he has a lower overall total of “followers”)… but who cares, who knows if he’s even running.

Donald Trump has a million fake twitter followers as well, while most of the remaining candidates have far fewer fake followers… and far fewer followers overall.

From Yahoo Tech:

“Fake Twitter followers abound among the U.S. presidential candidates as they gear up for the election in 2016. And Hillary Clinton isn’t the only candidate with more than a million of them. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump also has well over a million fake followers. Other candidates have them, too, but not as many (in large part because they don’t have as many followers, period).

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,” explained David Caplan, co-founder of TwitterAudit.

Fake followers aren’t inherently bad,” Caplan said, “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.”

Here’s another telling stat: Bernie Sanders’ real twitter follower count is 330,000 or 92% — and of the top 10 US politicians with the most twitter followers, Bernie scores the highest percentage of ‘warm body’ followers…  showing that the man is a far more honest politician who cares far less about optics than most of his opponents.

In fact, Bernie only loses to George Pataki (93%) and Lindsey Graham (90%) — who only had about 71,000 and 42,000 real followers respectively.

Rand Paul had more real followers than Bernie, but also scored a lower percentage of real ones. He’s still a good candidate, but hardly the shiniest apple, having been beaten by Marco Rubio slightly in terms of both percentage and number.

Chris Christie had the lowest number of Twitter followers of all the presidential hopefuls; he also scored the lowest percentage of real followers, and he’s the ONLY candidate who scored less than 60%… or a paltry 15,000 and 43%.

SOURCE: Zero Hedge

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