Thanks to the Status People, there is a way to check to see how many alleged fake followers you or other Twitter users have: http://fakers.statuspeople.com
It’s not perfect, but it’s something.
It takes a “sample of your follower data. Up to 500 records depending on how ‘popular’ you are and assess them against a number of simple spam criteria.”
They also say that this tool is accurate for 10,000 followers or less. “If you’re very ‘popular’ the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base.”
You can read more about the Faker Followers tool here: http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/FindOutMore/
With those caveats in mind, here are screenshots of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates:
Out of Obama‘s 18,653,463 followers, 7,088,316 are identified as fake accounts following. Out of the 868,277 that follow Romney, 173,655 are considered fake, by the site.
On the flip side, that’s 4,849,900 “good” accounts following Obama and 425,456 following Romney. We’ve leave out the inactive ones.
That’s 22,491 fake accounts among the 112,455 following Biden and 52,916 fake ones among the 203,523 accounts following Ryan.
The “good” accounts are 42,733 for Biden and 77,339 for Ryan.
Truthfully, there are no real conclusions to make here… just some numbers/stats to look over.
NOTE: I took the “test” and am proud to say that only 3 percent of my followers are fake.
]]>Autocomplete suggestions occur when you begin typing out a search. According to Google, it’s “algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities and the contents of web pages indexed by Google.”
So, I was curious. What are Google users routinely searching for when it comes to the candidates for president and vice president?
Here are screen grabs displaying the current suggestions:
Search details: These searches were done on August 16, 2012 at around 2:30PM PT. I used a “reset” Safari browser. I reset the browser before each search. I was not logged into Google. I did these searches from my office USC campus, in Los Angeles.
Guessing from the results, these suggestions change over time, reflecting the larger news of the moment.
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