Since the day Hillary Clinton made it official that she was in the running for the 2016 U.S. presidential race, people have been speculating that she has been padding her social media accounts and boosting her popularity on sites like Twitter and Facebook by buying retweets. The Daily Mail recently published findings from a report that claimed that as many as 2 million of Clinton's 3.6 million Twitter followers were fake and inactive accounts she paid for. An audit was also done by Status People showed that it is believed that as little as 44 percent of Hillary's followers on social media are real people who are actively engaging and using these platforms- the rest are spam accounts and used only for boosting her numbers.

Clinton's Facebook page also has come under scrutiny and it seems to be failing inspection as well. How much would it cost someone to buy Twitter and Facebook followers? Surprisingly it is not that hard nor expensive to do so and businesses, musicians, authors, and actors among others have bought likes and followers and comments for their social media pages. There are dozens of places people can go online to order theses services and while some simply spam the account with fake likes other are more crafty about it and spread them out over time and sprinkle in 'live' accounts to keep the spam flags and filters from going off. These reports of Clinton's social media spending and her attempt to get a boost to her popularity on social media by buying them is nothing new and many candidates in the past have been suspected of doing just that- even the Donald, aka Donald Trump, has been accused of doing this same thing.

Fake followers or real followers, one thing is for certain- Hillary Clinton's official presidential campaign launch blew the roof off the social media sites. Her Twitter post where she made the announcement on its own gathered more than 103,000 retweets and had almost that many favorites. Time will tell how the social media war plays out and what true role it will have in one of the most hotly contested and most strongly debated campaigns in American history.