Twitter – How reports about Obama’s “fake” audience came to be



Contributing Writer
Photo: Mannequins Credit: Ben Earwicker


Twitter followers are under scrutiny lately, due in large part to StatusPeople’s Faker App.  The app samples a Twitter account and returns “fake” and “inactive” estimates based upon a certain criteria.  Unfortunately, some articles have overlooked the limitations of the app and made bold, incorrect assertions about certain (large) Twitter accounts.

The press reports on the President’s fake Twitter followers

It was widely reported last week that 70% of President Obama’s Twitter followers are fake.

The genesis of these reports appears to be the New York Times.  In the article, “Buying their way to Twitter fame,” the NYT uses StatusPeople’s suddenly trendy Faker App to determine this number.  The problem in this statement is that they don’t acknowledge (or even explore) the constraints of the tool they’re using.  It’s particularly problematic because the accuracy of the tool decreases as follower size increases, and Obama has a pretty big following (to the tune of 18.8 million).

StatusPeople’s methodology has improved…. but not enough for the big dogs

Rob Waller of StatusPeople posted a couple of days ago that their Faker App has increased the population of followers that they draw from.  Here is a quick snapshot of their methodology:

Before: assessed a random 10% of the last 5,000 followers

Now: assesses a random 1% sample of the last 100,000 followers

This may not seem like a big difference, but it is.  Where the previous methodology was only accurate for the most recent followers, this takes a more representative sampling from most accounts.

Consider the case of President Obama, though.  With 18.8 million followers, assessing 1000 followers represents .005% of his followers.  Sampling only the most recent 100K makes this an unrepresentative sample of his followers, especially given the fact that bots target and follow the biggest accounts on Twitter to mask their behavior from filters.  Since the likelihood for bots to be filtered increases through time and the likelihood to be followed by bots increases with follower size, it stands to reckon that there would be a lower percentage of fake followers in the 18.7 million followers that aren’t assessed.

What is the relevance of fake Twitter followers for the President?

Due to the relative newness of social media’s incorporation into political consciousness and how immediately politicians need to gain traction on a national stage, I suspect that nearly every politician (Barack Obama included) has purchased followers.  I don’t see this as controversial or even relevant.

The relevance of Twitter and other social networks in politics is how real followers are leveraged to take action.  Hopefully Obama and Romney have more informative metrics than follower count to measure that.

Photo Credit

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Writer about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.

Infographic: Is the value of Foursquare overstated? http://t.co/X6SwuqLLcD – 19 hours ago

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

  • http://twitter.com/bowden2bowden Randy Bowden

    This has been a hot topic of late and I have found your writings on the subject revealing. Guilty of paying little attention to the “follower” count on my twitter account and after being publicly called out about a very recent surge in my following lead me to investigate. Discovering that I had been a victim of a “friendly” prank from some “friendlies” who thought it would be a big hoot to deposit around 10,000 rotten little eggs in my account! Cleanup has been a process but very much needed. Just throws another kink into the equation…

  • http://generationbsquared.com/ Linda Bernstein

    I would love to talk to you about this sentence: “I suspect that nearly every politician (Barack Obama included) has
    purchased followers. I don’t see this as controversial or even
    relevant.” I said the same thing in a FB group, using the same reasoning you did, and nearly got my head bitten off. But I’m having trouble “getting over” the fact that many big Twitter chat hosts and their ilk seem to be buying followers – and I am not using fakers.statuspeople. Rather, when I look at TwitterCounter and find that people have a 50,000 jump in a day, or even a steady 1k new followers each day when they’re at about 60k followers, I can’t help but wonder where those followers come from. Common sense and metrics would argue against that being organic growth. Anyway, thanks for this piece.

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Linda for reading and commenting. What I’ve experienced when discussing politics is that people co-opt anything that will support their viewpoint. The Daily Show highlights this really well when they show Republicans and Democrats taking the exact same positions on certain points depending upon the circumstances, and I think any point around an identity issue like political affiliation will incite people to react positively or negatively. It’s too bad that Twitter is cutting off API access, a great app might have been to replicate the Twitter site and to allow users to fill in the follower count in their settings. It probably would serve the same purpose! Appreciate your insights, Linda!

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