Christie, Obama, Clinton and McCain draw some of the most fake followers. Twitter trend: Fakes

Politicians hustling to stay relevant on the social media battlefield should take notice before boasting about large numbers of Twitter followers: Their stats are almost certainly juiced.

A black market for fake followers — commonly known as “bots” — has infiltrated nearly every politically linked account from the White House to Congress to the 2016 campaign trail, undermining the reliability for one of the most commonly cited metrics of success in the Twittersphere.


According to a POLITICO-driven analysis, heavy hitters with Twitter handles attracting the highest rates of fake followers include the president’s political account @BarackObama (46.8 percent), Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s @DWStweets (35.1 percent), the official handle @SenJohnMcCain (23.6 percent) and likely White House aspirants @HillaryClinton (21.9 percent) and @ChrisChristie (18.9 percent).

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More rank-and-file members also have been hit by the bot boom, from South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson (18.8 percent) to Rep. John Fleming (28.3 percent), a Louisiana Republican who won back-to-back House GOP social media contests in 2010 and 2011.

Assigning blame is nearly impossible for the fake follower phenomenon, which violates Twitter’s rules but has nonetheless earned its place in Internet lore alongside the ranks of the Nigerian prince and his incessant money transfer requests, to phony Amazon reviews and websites that sell Facebook-likes by the bundle. Many of the politicians attracting bogus bots very well may have no idea and it’s virtually pointless to try to pinpoint the blame.

Operatives working at the crossroads of politics and technology say the culprits behind fake followers are sometimes overzealous campaign workers or friends of a candidate looking for quick Twitter fame. “It’s for their bosses, because they’re obsessed with it,” said a GOP consultant aware of colleagues who have bought bots. “It’s just stupid.”

And bot buyers may not be just thinking about improving their own totals. It could be someone spending a couple of dollars — $20 on one site offers 1,000 fake followers added in two to three days — to load up an opponent’s Twitter account in the hope it sprouts as a negative news story. Aides to Mitt Romney argued as much when the 2012 GOP presidential nominee faced questions and media reports of abnormal Twitter follower activity.

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“I think there are times that the other side does it to get you caught,” said Zac Moffatt, who ran Romney’s digital campaign and recalled reaching out to Twitter for help after his boss’s Twitter followers jumped by more than 115,000 in a single day in July 2012. “There’s no way that this is just happening randomly.”

Bots have become a Twitter fact of life. Twitter experts note that the bots’ human creators — often working from Eastern Europe and Asia — have been programming accounts to follow public figures like politicians and celebrities (this means you @justinbieber) in an attempt to look more real and evade the Twitter police trying to shut down the accounts.

The fake follower craze has sent some politicians scrambling for new ways to measure their social media influence (it’s not the size of your Twitter following, they say, but what you do with your tweets), while also raising questions of whether putting so much time, money and effort into such a new element of campaigning and messaging is even worth it.

“It’s something that we’re going to have to deal with in the digital space,” said Guy Harrison, a GOP consultant and former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee who said he’s seen bots deployed in primaries “when you’re playing the vanity network game.”

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It’s also a trouble spot for Twitter, a Silicon Valley heavyweight that started selling stock to investors last fall with an overarching goal to drive up its own user numbers.

JD Chang, founder of TrendPo, a political analytics company that sells data on Twitter and Facebook metrics to campaign and member offices, including the House Republican Conference, said getting stuck with fake followers “definitely” worries lawmakers and their aides who are otherwise eager to experiment on social media but fret over its many potential pitfalls. The future of social media analysis, he added, should center on metrics like Facebook posts and Twitter retweets and replies.

“When you have fake followers and fake fans, what that could do is damage the reputation of the platform,” Chang said. “I don’t think it’s a gigantic problem that’s going to take down Facebook and Twitter, but it’s a problem that they have to combat and figure out.”

For Twitter users, follower size has been one of the earliest and easiest ways to measure and define success. The White House boasted in an August 2012 email that it had “reached 3,000,000 followers!” and also sent out a note in December celebrating the addition of nearly 1 million more new followers over the past year. House Democrats and Republicans this summer will stage their annual social media contests, which measure things like new Facebook likes and Twitter followers. The GOP has since shifted to a scoring system that goes beyond just the overall follower figures to consider measurements like how many people share a post, while the Democrats say they won’t be making similar changes this year because it would favor people with already large followings.

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Reporters also routinely rely on followers when comparing lawmakers and their party’s online prowess.

POLITICO’s analysis of fake Twitter followers was conducted by Barracuda Networks, a Silicon Valley-based IT security company. It examined the largest accounts for nearly all 535 members of Congress (many lawmakers have multiple handles — one or two for their official duties and another that mixes their personal and political efforts, while a handful remain totally absent from the platform), as well as the leading 2016 White House hopefuls and Obama’s official and political accounts.

In studying the data, Barracuda considered 28 different metrics — full details are the company’s proprietary business information — that include the platform used to post tweets and several pieces of information requested by Twitter upon opening an account. It’s no exact science, and some followers end up in a gray area and at best can be labeled “uncertain” instead of either real or fake. Twitter also restricts access to some account data. Still, the company’s efforts are considered among the best in the social media analytics industry at gauging what’s what.

The @BarackObama account, now managed by Organizing for Action, leads the political pack in fake followers, according to Barracuda’s analysis. In fact, of the more than 43 million followers when the data were studied last month, just 36.6 percent were deemed “good” under its metrics, while 46.8 percent count as “fake.” An additional 16.6 percent of the @BarackObama followers are labeled “uncertain.”

For @WhiteHouse, the official Twitter handle that boasts more than 4.8 million followers, 51.8 percent notched a good score. But 31 percent qualified as fake and 16.8 percent were uncertain.

The 2016 presidential hopefuls fared a little better. While @HillaryClinton hasn’t sent many tweets (70 at the time of the analysis) since she launched her account last June, nearly 21.9 percent of her 1.4 million-plus followers are fake, while 12.1 percent were uncertain and 65.3 percent were considered good. Christie had roughly the same number of good followers on his two Twitter accounts — the official @GovChristie (73.4 percent) and his political account @ChrisChristie (71.4 percent), which could serve as his home platform for a presidential campaign. But the two accounts also had higher than normal fake follower counts too: 18.9 percent for @ChrisChristie and 12.6 percent for @GovChristie.

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On Capitol Hill, Wasserman Schultz’s political account — with more than 260,000 followers — holds the prize for the largest number of bots, at 35.1 percent. Just 46.2 percent of her followers were considered good, while another 18.5 percent came out uncertain.

Also atop the House bot count: Fleming, the winner of the first two GOP social media contests, with 28.3 percent of his 8,700-plus followers qualifying as fake; @RepPaulRyan (25.6 percent of nearly 374,500); @SpeakerBoehner (24.8 percent of 648,700-plus); @NancyPelosi, (23.5 percent of nearly 487,000); @MicheleBachmann (19 percent of 218,600-plus); Eric Cantor’s @GOPLeader account (14.2 percent of 223,000); North Carolina Democrat @GKButterfield (13.2 percent of almost 3,500); California Democrat @RepBera (12.5 percent of 4,200-plus); and Nevada Democrat @repdinatitus (12.4 percent of 4,600-plus).

McCain’s official account — with north of 1.8 million followers — leads the Senate with 23.6 percent fake followers. The Arizona Republican is followed by @SenRandPaul, (20.2 percent of 432,500-plus); @McConnellPress (19.8 percent of 34,100-plus); @CoryBooker (19.7 percent of almost 1.5 million); @SenJohnsonSD (18.8 percent of 10,800-plus); @SenTedCruz (17.7 percent of nearly 303,200); @marcorubio (15.4 percent of 599,400-plus); @SenatorReid (12.7 percent of 202,300-plus); and @SenBillNelson (11.8 percent of 35,900-plus).

In the House, where 428 members have at least one type of active Twitter account, an average of 6.7 percent of the lawmakers’ followers are fake. The Senate, where all 100 members have at least one account, an average of 8.8 percent of the followers qualify as bots.

Several lawmakers with high rates of fake followers said they weren’t aware that bots even existed.

“I just use it as another way of getting the word out and I didn’t even know you could have fake followers,” Titus said in an interview. “I thought people had to sign up to get your Twitter. This is a whole other world that I’m not even aware of.”

A few minutes later, Titus returned to a POLITICO reporter to ask how Reid and neighboring Nevada congressman, Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford (4.5 percent of about 5,100), fared in the bot analysis.

POLITICO sought comment on the analysis results from the White House, 2016 contenders and House and Senate offices with some of the highest rates of followers. Aides to Reps. Ryan and Wasserman Schultz and Sens. Cruz, Johnson and Nelson said their offices didn’t buy fake followers and insisted they’d continue to use the social media platform as a way to connect with constituents and people who live outside their states.

“We don’t use it as an indicator of anything,” said Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin. He noted the Florida Democrat’s office had reached out to Twitter for help cleaning up its follower list — especially dormant accounts — but were told, “There’s no way to do that.”

Moffatt, the Romney digital director now working at the GOP consulting shop Targeted Victory, said fake followers can be a problem for politicians who have reputations for exaggeration. They also present a challenge for candidates trying to determine whether to use their limited resources on new technologies. “If your social media isn’t creating a community to be engaged, then the real question is what’s the point of it,” he said.

Romney’s Twitter bot trouble was his own making, said Laura Olin, the Obama 2012 campaign’s social media director. “It made them look a little bit desperate and sad, especially because they made a big deal and talked about how their follower growth was off the chart,” she said.

But Olin also acknowledged bots weren’t just a problem for the Republicans. Obama’s campaign also noticed when only a small percentage of the president’s followers were retweeting or even clicking on the president’s Twitter messages.

“We realized someone could totally do that to us and there would be no way to disprove that we’d done it,” she said.

Both the White House and Organizing for Action, the Democratic group which manages the president’s personal Twitter account, declined to comment.

In its annual report, Twitter estimated that fewer than 5 percent of its 240 million customers — about 12 million – represent fake accounts.

A Twitter spokesman, who refused to be quoted directly or by name, cautioned against relying solely on an independent research firm to decipher the number of fake followers on its site. Only Twitter can see everything being done on Twitter. The spokesman added that other social media sites like Facebook and YouTube face similar problems, while also acknowledging there’s a whac-a-mole-like problem with increasingly sophisticated bots that mask themselves as real users.

Social media researchers caution that bots operate in a murky and lucrative world — $40 million to $360 million annually in fake Twitter followers, with Facebook spam also generating about $200 million a year, according to Huffington Post bloggers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli — where deceit is central to the entire market.

To avoid detection, bots are often modeled after real people with real photographs, tweeting with regularity, following popular figures and even posing questions and offering comments for the Twitterverse.

“If I were to write a bot simulating a person interested in politics to sell to a candidate, I’d make it look like a political junkie,” said Fil Menczer, director of Indiana University’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. His team has grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation to study social media misinformation, including fake Twitter users and recently created an online tool — Bot or Not — that searches for patterns that can signal whether an account is real or fake.

“The whole point is to look like normal people,” explained Tim Hwang, chief scientist at the San Francisco-based Pacific Social Architecting Corp. He warned that politicians are headed toward bot warfare given the “air of plausible deniability” that surrounds where the fake followers come from.

“I think it will really become competitive because these campaigns are really difficult to detect,” he said. “If one campaign starts using them, there will be a lot of interest about launching similar campaigns on the other side.”