More Than Half Of Joseph Muscat’s Twitter Followers Are Fake, Social Media Audit Finds
Joseph Muscat may be the most followed Maltese politician on Twitter but it seems like more than half of the Prime Minister’s 73,000 followers are actually fake.
Lovin Malta placed the Twitter handles of some of Malta’s major politicians into TwitterAudit, a social media tool which indicates the percentage of real and fake followers on a user’s account. The audit takes a sample of up to 5,000 followers and calculates a score for each of them based on their number of tweets, date of the last tweet and ratio of followers to friends to find out whether the accounts are real or fake.
This essentially means that ‘fake’ accounts are classified as accounts with little to no activity other than following other accounts.
Joseph Muscat could only muster a 46% score, with TwitterAudit estimating that 39,460 of his followers are fake and only 33,749 are real, with the data score last updated five years ago.
This is an unusually low score for a politician.
Opposition leader Adrian Delia has a 95% score, while PN MEP Roberta Metsola, the second most followed Maltese politician, has a 94% score.
Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister hopeful Chris Fearne also has a 94% score, while fellow hopeful Robert Abela, who isn’t even that active on Twitter, has a score of 97%.
Labour MEP Miriam Dalli scores 95%, PL deputy leader Chris Cardona scores 94% and Transport Minister Ian Borg scores 95%.
PN deputy leader David Agius scored 95%, PN secretary general Clyde Puli scored 94% and former PN leader Simon Busuttil scored a pretty low 67%.
Muscat’s score also compares incredibly poorly with some well-known international politicians.
For example, US President Donald Trump has a 78% score, while his predecessor Barack Obama, the most followed politician on Twitter worldwide, has an 85% score.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a 93% score, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has a 97% score, French President Emmanuel Macron has an 84% score and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has an 82% score.
What do you make of all this? Let us know in the comments and tag someone who follows Joseph Muscat on Twitter
READ NEXT: Enemalta Denies Restricting Electricity Consumption As Sliema Guesthouse Owner Flags ‘Daily Limit’ Warnings
