Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are not polling well when it comes to their social media fans.
An analysis of the pair's Twitter accounts has revealed that over one million of Clinton's followers are fake, while only 53% of Biden's social media fans are real.
Also polling poorly is Donald Trump, who like Clinton has over one million fake followers.
Yahoo Tech analyzed the Twitter accounts of the presidential hopefuls, and while Clinton and Trump both have the highest number of fake followers, their percentage of real followers is comparatively good at 66% and 69% respectively.
Those two candidates also have far more followers than anyone else running for president.
Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush meanwhile may not have as many followers, but they have strong support with 92% of Sanders' Twitter followers and 89% of Bush's followers being reported as real.
Presidential Hopefuls
Real Twitter Followers
- Donald Trump - 2.669million (69%)
- Hillary Clinton - 2.666million (66%)
- Marco Rubio - 690,000 (84%)
- Rand Paul - 523,000 (83%)
- Ted Cruz - 399,000 (83%)
- Carly Fiorina - 398,000 (87%)
- Bernie Sanders - 330,000 (92%)
- Mike Huckabee - 320,000 (81%)
- Ben Carson - 293,000 (82%)
- Rick Perry - 270,000 (86%)
- Rick Santorum - 207,000 (86%)
- Jeb Bush - 189,000 (89%)
- Bobby Jindal - 185,000 (89%)
- Scott Walker - 143,000 (86%)
- John Kasich - 75,000 (76%)
- Martin O'Malley - 71,000 (89%)
- George Pataki - 42,000 (93%)
- Lindsey Graham - 18,000 (90%)
- Chris Christie - 15,000 (43%)
According to the site, President Barack Obama has almost 40million fake followers compared to 23million real ones, while Michelle Obama is doing much better with 60% of her followers being real.
'For large accounts (1 million+ followers), the percentage of real followers sometimes tends towards 50%,' said Caplan.
'This doesn't necessarily mean the other 50% are fake. It's more likely that many users are just inactive or use Twitter to occasionally read tweets. For large accounts, if the score is 60% (real followers) then I'd say that is a pretty good score.'
He then added; 'Fake followers aren't inherently bad, they are just a dishonest form of using social media. They can be leveraged to inflate someone's reputation.
People will most likely follow someone who already has many followers, so buying followers is a way to boost your follower count in the future.
Fake followers can also be used to commit fraud in the sense that you can inflate the value of your Twitter account for advertising purposes without creating any real value.'
"I'm being followed by more twits than you!" Yeah, OK, you win.