Posted on 06/18/2015 6:53:21 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Do you wish there was a fast and easy way to tell if one of the front running presidential candidates is a big fat phony? Well fret not, because such a method exists. All you have to do is run the name of their twitter account through twitteraudit.com, and find out how many of their followers are bots and shills. Obviously, if someone is willing to buy a bunch of fake followers, then they’re probably a pretty disingenuous person.
So how do the front running presidential candidates rank in terms of fake twitter followers? Vocativ.com ran their twitter accounts through the program, and compiled the data into the image you see below. Spoiler alert: Most of the candidates are pretty damn phony, and the worst offender didn’t come as a big surprise.
Granted, this method isn’t foolproof. I ran my twitter account through this program, and found a couple of fake followers, though I don’t recall ever deliberately putting them there. Every twitter account has a few, so it’s safe to assume that the candidates at the top of this list, while perhaps phony for other reasons, hiring fake twitter followers may not be one of them. As for the rest of these people, I can’t imagine how someone could accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, with 15-35% of them being fake, unless that someone has long since abandoned all of their scruples.
Jeb Bush hasn’t been vague about what he believes, that much I appreciate. And while he may have real twitter followers, he’ll never have my vote.
It would take more than just twitter follower audits to determine if a candidate is a phony or not. Oh, it might be one indication, but there are other more benign reasons that every twitter account picks up fake followers.
"The ratio of real-to-fake Twitter followers for some of the top 2016 presidential contenders"
A report that touts ratios and then presents percentages. [Sigh].
I have 3% fake followers myself out of 367 followers. Mostly they’re scam accounts to dating sites.
I’m assuming that famous people would pick up a lot more of those leeches.
absolutely.
Big deal. I audited my own account, and fared only marginally better than Jeb Bush. I haven’t paid for any fake followers. I don’t know exactly why they’re glommed on to me; probably to artificially boost their own credibility somehow.
I imagine that could also interpret this little survey as a gauge of the popularity of these respective candidates on Twitter, where bots and spammers tend to gravitate toward trending topics and high-profile users.
That said, Hillary does seem to be a significant outlier.
Wonder why they lumped Ted and Paul together??? or did it just mean they had the same score?
....and that’s why Trump is somewhat refreshing.
He doesn’t have to steal from the bankrupted treasury as he’s richer than Midas.
(Not the muffler chain.)
‘The Donald’ is worth 9 Billion Dollars, but we can do better! We can get George Soros to run! He is worth 24.2 Billion. That’s over twice what Donald has. I bet there are FReepers who just got a thrill up their leg with my suggestion. Since making a lot of money makes seems for some to make a good Presidential Candidate.
You could always settle for the Clinton duo.
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