Forget the “faceless men” for a moment, ’cause Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull apparently has a few faceless eggs to worry about.
According to the latest stats from TwitterAudit – which does exactly what it says on the tin – Australia’s leader can only claim 54% of his Twitter following as legitimate.
Yup, nearly 300,000 members of his ardent audience don’t actually exist. Well, that might not be entirely accurate: they do exist, but they’re probs just strings of code designed to funnel naive users into low-rent porn sites.
Note: Although
Tony Abbott was embroiled in a
mini-scandal involving the alleged purchase of fake Twitter followers just to bolster his figures, there’s nothing to say Turnbull’s following is anything but organically-collected online detritus.
A series of searches conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald also revealed our agile and innovative head honcho has the highest rate of faux-followers of any senior federal pollie.
By contrast, “fringe” politicians like One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson seem to enjoy the largest percentages of legitimate followers.
This could be because nobody but hardcore devotees would bother to subscribe to their 140-character screeds. It could also be because modern spambots can be programmed to feel embarrassment. Who knows.
SMH also points out former PMs Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd dwarf Turnbull’s following with 750K and 1.6M followers, respectively; the theory is Turnbull’s lower figure may just be due to Twitter’s apparently waning influence in a rapidly-changing social media environment.
Of course, our current PM is all about Snapchat now, so perhaps he’s not even too fussed that a sizable minority of his Twitter devotees are spambots; he might not even be concerned about the platform’s supposed decline at all.
We can think of a some users with rock-solid followings that might be a bit miffed if the platform takes a dip, though:
