Twitter than thou: The #Feku world of online followers

Feku is not just an online insult coined to raise the hackles of Narendra Modi’s loyal fans. There’s plenty that’s Feku going on in the Big Brag World of Internet.

[caption id=“attachment_1171227” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Twitter logo. AFP image[/caption]

It’s clear that the online world has become quite the battleground for our electoral Mahabharata. Both Congress and the BJP are putting in a lot of resources into drumming up their online presence. The BJP is ahead of the Congress in this game, not least because its standard bearer Narendra Modi has a phenomenal Twitter following.

Modi, as of today has 2,555,872 followers. But an article in The Hindu says online tools like Twitter Audit or the Fake Follower Check of Status People shows that many of Mr. Modi’s followers might be virtual rather than real.

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Fake Follower says Modi’s follower breakdown is 76 per cent Fake, 18 per cent Inactive and a mere 6 percent Good.

His Twitter Audit score gets a thumbs down at 32 percent, meaning the followers the software identifies as likely to ‘fake’ outnumber ‘real’ ones 2:1.

But there’s no reason for Modi’s opponents to get elated and exult “I told you so.”

The Congress’ tweeting pioneer Shashi Tharoor does not fare much better. His Twitter Audit score is just 35%. And these low scores extend to celebrities across the board. Shah Rukh Khan clocks in at 78 percent Fake, 17 percent Inactive and only 5 percent Good. Amitabh Bachchan’s audit score is 24 percent.

Compare that to Bill Clinton at 83 percent and Barack Obama at a respectable 49 percent.

So are our desi hot shots so size conscious they are inflating their numbers because bigger is always better?

It is possible, as The Hindu reports to buy yourself Twitter fan following. Websites such as Fiverr.com will sell you 1,000 Twitter followers for as low as $5. You can also buy Facebook likes and Youtube views to pad your social portfolio all around. The cheapest followers are computer-generated bots. For a higher cost you can buy real people who can be targeted based on geographic area or areas of interest according to John Galtman of Buy More Followers.

All this, by the way, is perfectly legal if ethically dubious. This is not buying votes. You can already pay to promote your posts and status updates on Facebook which means they will be more visible to your friends who can then choose to like them. This goes one step further and actually buys “likes” which is anyway the ultimate goal.

Dan Nainan, the comedian, admitted to _ The New York Timest_hat he bought Twitter followers and boosted his numbers from 700 to 220,000 plus in one fell swoop. He sees it as a business proposition.

“When people see that you have that many followers, they’re like: ‘Oh, my goodness, this guy is popular. I might want to book him.’ "
It can backfire. Mitt Romney raised a lot of red flags when his Twitter following jumped 116,000 followers in one day. The embarrassment at being caught artificially inflating your own numbers aside, there are other risks. “Did you pay for your followers with a credit card? If so, a hacker who makes fake followers now has your credit card number,” says Roy Judge, chief researcher at Barracuda Labs to NextWeb.com.

But this does not mean anyone can say our big guns are firing on (mostly) empty cylinders.

Part of the problem is the fake-sniffing algorithms are not foolproof. Spam accounts often follow a lot of other accounts but have few or no followers or tweets. They also have the classic egg head as a profile picture.

However it’s quite conceivable that there are people who follow Modi and Shah Rukh Khan and Shashi Tharoor etc and see what they tweet out but can never think of anything to tweet out themselves. India’s online world is active but it does not mean there aren’t plenty of lurkers.

In fact, I went and ran the tests on my far more modest Twitter following and discovered my audit score was 80 percent and my account was tagged 10 percent fake 38 percent inactive 52 percent good. A colleague’s vital statistics came in at 23-42-35.

That sounds good but it also makes two things obvious - appearances are deceptive and just because a software algorithm thinks something is fake, it does not have to be so. Secondly, even if there are fake followers, they have attached themselves without our knowledge.

Part of that can come from another number boosting strategy - firms that find ‘real’ Twitter people to follow others in the hope they will follow them back. According to Digital Trends FollowerSale gives real people incentives to follow their customers.
Fast Followerz allows its customers control over how many followers are added daily so they do not go up in suspicious, regular bursts.

We all known quantity is not quality but no one wants to come up short in the Twitter wars because politicians think in our culture we are taken more seriously when we have the numbers. Mind you, fake followers have no impact on Klout scores because that’s based on real interactions. But the allure of numbers burns strong. I remember a Twitter-fight between a well-known political columnist and another lesser-know journo. Eventually the well-known columnist ended the Twitter-fight in a huff, saying she refused to have a Twitter-spat with someone whose follower count was so much lower than hers.

As we go into the numbers game for elections 2014 it’s worth remembering one golden rule: when it comes to social media all that twitters is definitely not gold.