[TRENDING] 70% of Najib's Followers Are Fake. Believe It Or Not?
Surprise! 70% of PM Najib's Twitter followers are fake! He is number two in the list of political leaders who has the most fake Twitter followers in the world. At least according to a research by Meld Magazine, published on 15 May 2013. The 'Fake Follower Check' web app revealed US President Barack Obama had the most fake followers, but Najib beats him in terms of percentage. How accurate is this? Do you follow any of these political leaders? Do you think Najib bought his fake followers?
By Judith Yeoh — 15 May 2013, 04:03 PM — Updated almost 11 years ago
70% of Najib's 1.41 million Twitter followers are fake according to Australian online magazine
@NajibRazak on twitter, the official Twitter account for Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Najib Tun Razak
Image via imgur.comA recent check using Fake Follower Check showed a whopping 70 per cent of Prime Minister Najib’s 1.41 million followers were fake.
meldmagazine.com.auAnother 15 percent of Najib’s followers were found to be inactive, according to the report published on May 3, while the remaining 15 percent are believed to be genuine Twitter users.
malaysiakini.com
The SAYS test shows 51% of Najib's 1.56 million followers are fake
SAYS ran our own test on http://fakers.statuspeople.com and the results showed that Najib had 51% fake followers out of 1.56 million followers as of 15 May 2013. Najib had 1.41 million followers at the time Meld Magazine;s test results showed 70% fake followers.
Image via imgur.comThe SAYS test shows 27% of Anwar Ibrahim's 337k followers are fake
SAYS also ran a test on Anwar Ibrahim's twitter account. Results showed 27% of Anwar's 337,194 followers are fake (15 May 2013).
Image via imgur.comOther political leaders who have the most fake followers
In Meld Magazine's comparison of eight political leaders from the US, Australia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak topped the list for having the largest proportion of fake followers.
Image via imgur.comIn our comparison of eight political leaders from the US, Australia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak topped the list for having the largest proportion of fake followers.
meldmagazine.com.auJust under half of US President Barack Obama’s 13.1 million followers were found to be fake, and for Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, 36 per cent of her 130,680 followers were fake.
meldmagazine.com.auWhat do you mean 'fake'?
Defining a fake or spam account isn't an exact science, but here's the guiding principle for StatusPeople's algorithm: "Spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But they tend to follow a lot of other accounts."
The most coveted fake accounts tweet (or retweet) constantly, have profile pictures and complete bios, and some even link to Web sites that they claim belong to them. But in many cases, a close look reveals that some of the accounts were set up purely to retweet material from specific sites.
In the case of someone who has purchased fake followers, the account generally sees a spike in user numbers followed by an equivalent drop in the number of followers about a month later
forbes.comWhere do these fakers come from? Why would people buy them for their accounts?
Thomas Tudehope, social media expert from social@Ogilvy says Twitter users can easily purchase followers starting from 100 and upwards to 10,000 followers at varying prices.
meldmagazine.com.au"Someone might have deliberately purchased followers for them.. politicians have a busy schedule so I don’t think they’ve got time to keep track of fake accounts," says Thomas Tudehope.
malaysiakini.com
Since the early days of social media, the number of followers has been a key metric of value but getting there is tricky business. Having a large number of followers = a value of quality, which may be based on some flawed assumptions.
forbes.com“There is now software to create fake accounts,” Mr. De Micheli said in an interview. “It fills in every detail. Some fake accounts look even better than real accounts do.”
What is the Fake Follower Check and is it accurate?
Fake Follower Check does what it says. It checks your Twitter followers to see if they are real or fake. Or in other words, it checks to see how many spam accounts are following you. And the great thing about it is you can check your friends and 'enemies' too...
We take a sample of your follower data. Up to 1,000 records depending on how 'popular' you are and assess them against a number of simple spam criteria.
For those of you with 50,000* followers or less we believe our tool will provide a very accurate insight into how many inactive and fake followers you have.
If you're very, very 'popular' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base.
We tested out our own @SAYSdotMy Twitter account too!
The SAYS test on @SAYSdotMy twitter account! Only 5% of our 17,503 followers are fake as of 15 May 2013.
Image via imgur.com