Which presidential candidate has the most fake Twitter followers?

We ran the slide-rule over the candidates' social media followings

Clockwise from top right: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz
Clockwise from top right: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz Credit: Photo: Bloomberg/AFP

Nine candidates currently remain in the race for the US presidency.

Just for the fun of it, we ran each of their Twitter accounts through the Twitter Audit web app, which determines what proportion of an account's followers are real, and what are 'fake'.

The site takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower.

The site says: "This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake.

"Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means."

That's not to say that any of the candidates are likely to have engaged in "fraudulent or dishonest" practices - it's more likely that, as their profiles have grown, they've become more a target for Twitter 'bots'.

According the Twitter Audit, the presidential candidate with the largest proportion for fake Twitter followers was ... HILLARY CLINTON.

Here's how the rest of the candidates' accounts fared.

Presidential candidates - by proportion of FAKE Twitter followers

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Presidential candidates - by size of Twitter following