Hillary Clinton launches her presidential campaign in New York City in June. (Photo by Reuters)

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).



In fact, almost every person on Twitter has some fake followers. I have them, but since I have relatively few followers compared to real celebrities, I have fewer fake ones. Chances are you have fake followers, too.

As far as the election goes, present numbers show Clinton and Trump well ahead of the pack in both presidential polling and Twitter followers — the real and the fake kind. So if we were to consider the size of a candidate’s Twitter following as a kind of crude proxy for political popularity or electability, then questions about what it means to have a large number of fake Twitter followers become even more fascinating.

What makes a Twitter follower fake?

We found out how abundant fake Twitter users are thanks to a site called TwitterAudit, which analyzes Twitter accounts and then tells you how many of that account’s followers are real and how many are fake. TwitterAudit isn’t the only service that does this. There’s also the StatusPeople site; unlike TwitterAudit, StatusPeople will show you who some of those fake users are, how many it considers actually fake and how many are just inactive.



But what, exactly, is a fake follower?

Shaking hands, kissing babies, and amassing phony Twitter followers. (Data courtesy of TwitterAudit – Click here to see a larger version)

“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.

Clearly, the definition of a fake follower is open to interpretation. Some of the followers that these services consider fake are actually news collection services that harvest tweets and use them to find and publish news stories; when I tweet about this story after it’s posted, those services will pick up that tweet, and then may put this story on their pages, or include a link back to Yahoo Tech.

In other words, fake doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not real followers. It could mean that they’re just not individual users who are constantly following, responding, and adding other followers.

The obvious question, then, is: Where do those fake followers come from? As you might expect, there’s an app for that — more precisely, a website called Social Followers that promises to add thousands of new names to your list.

It certainly shouldn’t be assumed that any of today’s presidential campaigns would need to use a social media blasting service to gain followers that could be considered fakes. These types of accounts also have a propensity to show up on their own — not so much because they’re really fake, but because they’re lurkers who read Twitter feeds but don’t do a lot of tweeting on their own.

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