Twitter may not be the real world, but it sure does set the conversation in Westminster. Commentators once spoke of ‘the ground war’ of activists on the ground and the ‘air war’ of broadcast interviews, but increasingly social media is where battles are fought and won. This week an audit in the States found that nearly half of Joe Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are bogus, according to a study by software firm SparkToro which reported that 49.3 per cent of the president’s followers are ‘fake followers’.
SparkToro has defined ‘fake followers’ as ‘accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).’ The CEO of Tesla Elon Musk, who is attempting to buy Twitter, has proposed a potential crackdown on the sham accounts amid concerns over the growing number of fake accounts. So Mr S thought he would carry out a similar study about our leading politicians here in Westminster to see which one of SW1’s Twitter-obsessed, self-promoting elite comes top.
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