Twitter accounts of leaders like Modi, Amit Shah, Rahul flooded with fake followers
15 Mar 2018
Well over half the followers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Twitter are fake, according to studies based on the Twitter Audit algorithm (twitteraudit.com).
Rahul Gandhi topped the list of Indian leaders with fake followers on Twitter - 68 per cent. The Congress president has 6.2 million followers. He is closely followed by Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah, 67 per cent of whose Twitter followers are fake). Modi, the most followed Indian leader on Twitter, stands at number three, with 61 per cent of his Twitter followers fake.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor also has a large proportion of fake Twitter followers.
Twiplomacy, which assists international organisations and governments to improve their digital strategy, claimed that 24,799,527 of Modi's 40,993,053 followers are fake, according to The Indian Express.
According to The Week, the figures were determined with the help of Twitter Audit algorithm, considering factors such as the ratio of followers of friends, date of the last tweet and number of tweets.
The list also features Arun Jaitley, Arvind Kejriwal, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh, Outlook reported.
US President Donald Trump's percentage of fake followers is much lower than Indian leaders - at 26 per cent, though in the West, President Trump and Pope Francis lead the list of leaders with fake Twitter followers.
Twitter Audit is an external tool not affiliated to Twitter. It takes a sample 5,000 Twitter followers and assesses them on the number of tweets, followers, mutual follows and other parameters. It uses these to determine whether an account is fake or real.
''Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means,'' says the Twitter Audit website.
Pope Francis, who is followed by 16.7 million people, has 59 per cent fake followers, the report added.