More than half of President Barack Obama’s Twitter followers appear to exist only in cyber space, giving him the lead among influential American politicians with the most followers who aren’t real, according to research from the United Kingdom’s MailOnline.
Of President Obama’s 36.9 million followers, 19.5 million — 53 percent — are apparently phony accounts. Per a search engine at StatusPeople.com, merely 20 percent of Obama’s Twitter followers are actual human beings and users of the social network service.
At 46 percent, Vice President Joe Biden has the next largest percentage of fake follower accounts. Like his boss, only 20 percent of the Twitter followers he has accumulated are real and active accounts.
The White House has a 37 percent ratio of fake followers and 25 percent active, and first lady Michelle Obama’s Twitter following is 36 percent fake and 29 percent active.
The remaining gaps in the percentages for each comprise ‘inactive’ accounts — or those that belong to real people but are rarely, if ever, used.
While fake followers seem to be finding the White House with frequency, Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have their fair share, as well. One-third of House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) Twitter followers are phony; the same can be said for 29 percent of those following Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The Democratic leaders in Congress — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — have 29 and 28 percent fake followers, respectively.
The MailOnline story cited multiple reasons why Twitter users can amass such large amounts of phony interest: In some cases, advertisers or spammers follow influential accounts, and there even exist services that allow users to ‘buy’ chunks of artificial followers that have the appearance of being real but actually are fake.
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