Hillary Clinton’s 3.6 million Twitter followers may not be as impressive as it seems, as it emerged that around 2 million of them may be fakes that her team paid for.
Online measuring tools suggest that only 44% of her social media fan base are actually real people, with the rest of them either fake or inactive.
Daily Pakistan reports:
StatusPeople.com, the oldest publicly available Twitter-auditing tool, reports that 44 per cent of the former secretary of state’s followers are ‘good’; 15 per cent are ‘fake’; and 41 per cent are ‘inactive,’ meaning that they never tweet or reply to any tweets.
Just 4 per cent of President Barack Obama’s Twitter followers, by comparison, are considered fake.
The White House worked overtime to purge most of them after a September 2013 report found that more than half of his followers didn’t really exist.
Michelle Obama’s Twitter audience is 25 per cent fake, according to StatusPeople, along with 21 per cent of Vice President Joe Biden’s.
Another tool, TwitterAudit.com, sampled 320,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s followers and found that 18 per cent were fake.
The new measurements will add to the Clinton presidential campaign’s embarrassment following news on Tuesday that a large number of her Facebook fans may represent ‘likes’ that were purchased rather than earned.