Heh: 70% of Obama's Twitter Followers are Fake Accounts

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• Kate Hicks

He's the "social media president," having been the first one in the modern era to take full advantage of the ways the Internet can connect politicians to people. But a new study reveals that 70% of President Obama's 19 million twitter followers arecompletely fake.

President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.

A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.

"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.

"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."

The campaign denies having purchased any of them, but it's certainly funny to think that the overwhelming majority of Obama's Twitter followers don't actually exist!