David Cameron has nearly 150,000 fake followers on Twitter,  around 15% of the total, according to an article in the Daily Mirror yesterday. We are told that Nadine Dorries and William Hague have an even great percentage of bogus tweeters following their accounts.

How much actual research did The Mirror do to establish these numbers? Well not much actually, they used just one tool Status People’s Fakers App. They themselves say “our scores are relatively accurate for larger Twitter Accounts”.  Hardly conclusive then.

Take a closer look at the Mirror story and it’s clear that they’re not sure either.  The article says “15% of them appear to be fake”, “MPs most likely to have “fake” followers”, “21% of their followers apparently being fake”.  There are more caveats here than in a Hollywood pre-nup.

That said, Twitter is absolutely full of fake accounts, so here at Ballot Blogs we decided to check how many fake followers The Daily Mirror has.  We used three tools TwitterAudit, Social Bakers Fake Followers and the Fakers App used by The Mirror. The results were startling. Twitter Audit said The Mirror had 39.6% fake followers,  Social Bakers put it higher at 41%, Fakers App said 16% Fake and 48% inactive.  It seems @DailyMirror has more fake followers than the prime minister or indeed any of the politicians in their league of shame.