30-66% of the twitter followers of celebrities are fake… !
Is twitter followers a mirage ?
New Delhi, “Indian Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar leads the pack with an average of 66.5% fake followers. We are sure even Mr Tendulkar will not be noticing this trend in his following. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the least of fake followers. The fake follower average for the Prime Minister’s twitter account stood at 30.5% only”, says a twitter following analysis conducted over two months using paid and free analytic tools by www.fakenewsbuster.in, a website dedicated to the issue of digital transparency and busting fake news.
“Twitter analysts report that lot of the followers of Indian politicians come from Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey and Bangladesh. These countries have a lot of companies which offer the ‘fake follower’ services for a price, quietly. In India too there are many entities who offers to boost your Twitter following for a fee, says Ravi Prasad, an IITian and Carnegie Melon scholar who led the analysis of twitter following of ten celebrities from the world of politics, sports and films.
Commenting on the Twitter analysis, V K Cherian-Managing Editor, fakenewsbuster.in said “We have undertaken this analysis as Twitter wars are the order of the day especially in politics. Needless to say, all that glitters is not Gold among the twitter followers of India,”
Different tools take different sample sizes of celebrity and audit them against these criteria, and come out with different weightages. This explains the variations between tools. Here are some:
| Sl No | Name | Sparktoro
(Free Tool) (09.01.2019) |
Twitter Audit
(Paid Tool) (December 2nd Week) |
Twitter Audit (Paid Tool)
(21 February) |
Average % |
| 1 | Narendra Modi | 59.5% | 16% | 16% | 30.5 |
| 2 | Rahul Gandhi | 53.7% | 36% | 36% | 41.9 |
| 3 | Amitabh Bachchan | 57.2% | 38% | 38% | 44.4 |
| 4 | Shashi Tharoor | 46.1% | 62% | 38% | 48.7 |
| 5 | Virat Kohli | 59.1% | 56% | 49% | 54.7 |
| 6 | Subramanian Swami | 49% | 27% | 27% | 34.3 |
| 7 | Arvind Kejriwal | 52.8% | 29% | 29% | 36.6 |
| 8 | Sushma Swaraj | 51.1% | 31% | 31% | 37.7 |
| 9 | Sachin Tendulkar | 59.6% | 70% | 70% | 66.5 |
| 10 | Shahrukh Khan | 57.3% | 52% | 52% | 53.76 |
Accounts with similar size following have a median of 41% fake followers.
Who is a Fake Follower? These are accounts that are unreachable, and you will not see the accounts tweets (because they are spam, bought propaganda etc or because they are no longer active on Twitter).
Here are the links to actual audit for everyone to verify:
file:///Users/vkcherian/Desktop/Fake%20Follower%20Audit%20for%20@imvkohli%20%7C%20SparkToro.webarchive
file:///Users/vkcherian/Desktop/@Swamy39’s%20Audit%20%7C%20Twitter%20Audit%20%7C%20Audit%20your%20Twitter%20followers..webarchive
About fakenewsbuster.in: We are a community of domain experts including technologists, journalists, lawyers and civil rights activists who have worked for decades to protect the democratic nature of our country. We owe our allegiance to the Constitution of India and uphold the values on which Sovereign Secular Democratic Republic India has been built. Our editors and experts have volunteered their time to this project. We believe in the liberal democracy ensured by the Constitution of India and determined to uphold it.
For details of the story click here; http://fakenewsbuster.in/why-do-indian-celebrities-have-so-many-fake-followers-on-twitter/
