Hillary Clinton’s Twitter has the most fake followers: New audit

A newly released audit of Hillary Clinton’s main Twitter feed shows that 41 percent of her followers are not real people, a far higher percentage of fake followers than all other presidential candidates.

The audit was done by running Clinton’s Twitter address through TwitterAudit, which quickly measures how many followers are real people and how many are fake accounts, the Washington Examiner reported, which added that Clinton’s percentage of real followers, 59 percent, is lower than her rival Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has a 90 percent authentic user tally.

Clinton’s low authenticity figure means that at least 1,800,000 of her followers are computer bots or troll Twitter accounts, a related Headlines & Global News report indicated.

Fake followers are determined by the frequency of their own tweets – “number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends,” TwitterAudit was quoted by the Daily Mail, which added that the site is not affiliated with Twitter and acknowledges its scoring method “is not perfect.”

Among Republicans, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie comes closest to Clinton with 36 percent of his followers being fake, the Examiner reported, adding that both Donald Trump and Ben Carson have 34 percent fake followers.

Most other candidates hover around 25 or 30 percent fake followers, although Sen. Rand Paul has the most authentic group of followers with just 21 percent of his followers exposed as fakes, the Examiner claimed.

Most Twitter accounts have some fake followers, but politicians in particular have a reputation for buying followers in order to appear more popular on social media than they actually are, Headlines & Global News reported, adding that fake followers are often incapable of retweeting or favoriting posts and exist solely for public image purposes.