Seems like the internet has been playing with a feature called the “Twitter Audit”.
A Twitter audit takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower.
This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. The score is then used to determine whether any given user is real or fake.
The problem with such a scoring system is that it is unable to track human/bot propelled tweets (ie. tweets with activity behind them). It is only tracking latent tweets – those that are clearly registered to do nothing.
But that presents a problem too – many, many, many Singaporean twitter accounts are latent. They do nothing and have little followers… they just sit around and wait for news… pretty much like how fake accounts behave.
Inaccurate as it is, it’s still pretty fun to have a look at who’s being allegedly faking it out!
So it turns out that the Straits Times scored pretty low – over 122k “fake” followers!
So what about the ultimate thief of the internet? The “Real” Singapore?
58%… not bad.. but is it high? Compared to who?
Compared with The Online Citizen of course!
Terrible. But who then has a better score?
Turns out it is a group called “Fabrications about the PAP”! 86%
Even Lee Hsien Loong doesn’t have as many “real” users as FabPAP!
Oh, and talking about Lee Hsien Loong… here’s how many fake users the PAP Twitter page has :P
Oh and if you think that’s bad… here’s a statistic to hammer home the message:
What about us? What about Five Stars and a Moon? Well – we don’t have a particularly active Twitter account here…but we’re trying. So do follow us for more interesting news and opinions about Singapore! https://twitter.com/5starsandamoon
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