The number of followers a public figure has on Twitter is a badge of honour nowadays – but with bots and the ability to buy followers, it’s best to take them with a pinch of salt.
In an attempt to crack down on fake followers, Twitter recently announced it would be culling locked accounts. These are accounts that have been blocked from tweeting because they put out a lot of replies or mentions on social media without any obvious reasoning.
Starting last week Twitter started hiding the accounts so they wouldn’t be counted in a user’s followers.
Action on this starts today https://t.co/HSfFE9ReLi
— jack (@jack) July 12, 2018
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the purging would commence on his account, before confirming he had lost 200k followers in a tweet with three waving emojis.
Dorsey wasn’t the only high-profile tweeter to say goodbye to a huge number of followers that day, with the likes of actor Ashton Kutcher losing over a million followers alone, dropping from over 19m to 18m.
Website twitteraudit.com tells users how many of their followers are fake, so we ran a few high-profile tech figures through it to see which of them were not as popular as they may have thought – although it’s important to note that ‘fake’ here probably means bots that have followed the account, rather than followers the user has purchased.
Elon Musk
Followers
21,366,594 Real
844,003 Fake
Audit Score: 96 per cent
Richard Branson
Followers
6,239,318 Real
6,339,952 Fake
Audit Score: 49 per cent
Bill Gates
Followers
17,192,584 Real
28,051,059 Fake
Audit score: 38 per cent
Apple
Followers
1,447,410 Real
148,411 Fake
Audit score: 90 per cent – however, it’s interesting to note that the company didn’t lose any followers in the purge
Sheryl Sandberg
Followers
241,531 Real
12,980 Fake
Audit score: 94 per cent
Sundar Pichai
Followers
968,307 Real
422,939 Fake
Audit score: 69 per cent
Followers
57,844,885 Real
4,622,593 Fake
Audit score: 92 per cent
Ginni Rometty (IBM)
Followers
8,601 Real
2,960 Fake
Audit score: 74 per cent
And a few celebrities thrown in for good measure:
Kanye West
Followers
27,172,019 Real
696,718 Fake
Audit score: 97 per cent
Katy Perry (most followed Twitter account)
Followers
94,513,629 Real
12,281,432 Fake
Audit score: 88 per cent
Donald Trump
Followers
46,994,724 Real
6,166,729 Fake
Audit score: 88 per cent
However the best performing account so far was:
Katherine Lofthouse
Followers
459 Real
1 Fake
Audit score: 99 per cent