By Vijay Mukhi
The best job on the planet is being a columnist on Politics and Technology, because no one in this space  talks sense or hard facts and numbers. Breaking news everyday is about Narendra Modi’s Twitter followers being fake, but no one is offering any credible evidence on either side of the debate, fake or real. So, before I throw my hat in the ring and get egg all over me (which is all in days work for me) let me tell you that I believe in the maxim Trust but Verify so before you cast the first stone, please download all the data that I have gathered from Twitter from my website www.vijaymukhis.com. We are also comparing only Narendra Modi and Shashi Tharoor as the other politicians are pygmies on Twitter compared to these two giants.
Modi, today,  has 19,34,170 followers on Twitter compared to Tharoor who has  18,42,046, a lead of just under a lakh. Modi and Tharoor share  447,920 followers in common which is around 25% of their followers , Modi and Kiran Bedi share 408,401 followers and Modi also shares 2,98,005 followers with Arvind Kejriwal. Thus, we can safely conclude that there are about 4 lakh people on Twitter who just like following politicians from India — why, we have no answer. This leaves Modi with a maximum of 15 lakh fake followers as fake followers would not share politicians from different groupings.
How do we define a fake follower? Simple answer, someone who does not tweet. Modi has 6,77,296 followers who have never ever tweeted. Now imagine, why would someone join Twitter and not tweet at all! This is very extremely damning and conclusive evidence, we need no judge or jury to convict that these have to be fake followers. Thus if 35% of Modi followers have to be fake, what more evidence do you need! But, do not open the bubbly to celebrate, Tharoor has only 5,23,843 followers who also have never ever tweeted , which make up 28% of his followers. Can we thus draw a line in sand that says that if up to 28% of your followers have never ever tweeted then it is okay but any percentage above that makes these followers a fake? A more charitable explanation is that there is a silent (in terms on not liking the sound of a keyboard) majority out there on Twitter who do not tweet at all, but simply read tweets. If you take a step further, 12% of Modi and Tharoor’s followers tweeted only once and 7% only tweeted twice. A simply addition tells us that over 46% of Tharoor’s followers and 54% of Modi’s followers do not like to tweet or cannot tweet for various reasons. We need to accept that not everyone likes putting pen to paper even though we have to write less than 140 characters.
The best evidence of popularity or influence on Twitter is how many people follow you. About 4,85,077 or 25% or a quarter of Mod’s followers have 0 people following them. Aha, this nails Modi finally and this is enough  proof that these followers are fake! The obvious answer is that if you do not tweet then obviously no one will follow you and for Tharoor the number is 2,61,883 or 14%. The percentage of the number of followers who have only 1 or 2 followers following their tweets, sort of remains the same. Thus like sending tweets , we have a whole community of users on Twitter who are so important that nobody follows what they do. Twitter Orphans can well be a new addition to the English language, what say?
The obvious conclusion is that about half your followers would be inert or inactive or to use the TV analogy, coach potatoes who would surf from politician to politician.
One sureshot way of finding out whether your followers are fake is to look at how many followers did you add every day of the year. During the month of July 2013, Modi added on a average around 5000 followers per month and Dr Tharoor about a 1000. For May and June, these numbers were also similar. The only conclusion we can draw here is that Modi’s team is very smart, had they added 50,000 followers on one day, they could be caught in the deserts of Rajasthan. But what if I paid an agency (millions on the web that do this for a small fee) to increase Modi’s followers count by a lakh on a certain day, the media would go ballistic and say that Modi was caught with his hand in the desert sand.
I agree we are getting nowhere. So let’s look at another metric. When did  your Twitter followers create their account on Twitter or an ageing analysis. A whopping 1,02,385 of Modi followers were born on Twitter in April 2013, 94,874 in June 2013 or better still 502, 918 of his followers are under 180 days old on Twitter or created in the year 2103. For Tharoor, this number for 2013 is only 171,459. For 2012, the equivalent numbers are 595,656 for Modi and for Tharoor 360,540. A non-convincing explanation is that India is the youngest country in the world population wise and therefore all of your followers must represent this trend of being young. More than half of Modi’s followers have joined Twitter nearly a million , in the last 18 months only ,maybe just for him. This is why Twitter should give Modi an award for bringing so many people to Twitter!
Where Tharoor leaves Modi biting the dust is when it when to the quality of followers, and that also by a factor of 2. We simply added up all the followers of people who follow Tharoor and the number was an astonishing 27,89,94,347 and for Modi it was half that at 10,87,44,125. We have not removed duplicate followers from this list. So theoretically when Tharoor tweets and if all his followers retweet his tweet around 27 crore people would see that tweet. Tharoor followers have tweeted over  52,26,34,885 times but Modi’s followers being newer and weaker are half that at 27,57,99,883. On a average, a Tharoor follower has 150 followers who tweets 282 times and a Modi follower would have only 56 followers and tweets much less at 143. Thus an average Tharoor follower would beat a Modi follower in a virtual fist fight as Tharoor has a long and khandhani history on Twitter.  Maybe and we have no evidence for saying this, but a Modi follower may have more pets (aka puppies) than a Tharoor follower. It a foregone conclusion that Tharoor’s followers are twice as strong as Modi’s followers and no guesses who would win a twitter slugfest, in spite of what conventional wisdom says that Modi’s followers are winning on Twitter.
OMG, read over 5000 characters ie 35 tweets (my editor decides column length in tweets and not characters) Â and yet no conclusion on whether Modi has fake followers or not! So, let’s muddy the waters even more. Go to the Twitter page of a user vijaymukhi712 by typing www.twitter.com/vijaymukhi712. This user bears my name and I have actually tweeted 86 times, a pretty active user one would have to admit, to a fake user under any yardstick. Every day my internet avatar ( not sure of the sex as you will soon see) quotes a love tweet so has his heart in the right place. But if you check further, say the 19th of every month, you will see the same love quote. This user is a creation of a computer program (which is why I cannot determine the sex) Â which wakes up at 7 in the morning GMT and depending of the day of the month sends out a tweet. I did not have the time to create a database with 365 tweets. Is this a fake user or a non-human user, a word that will enter the human lexicon very soon. Twitter makes it very easy to create a user that needs no verification and we all tweet using some computer a program written by a programmer. Will there be a way to distinguish between a fake user from a machine-created one? May be and a big may be in my next life!
Finally, all fake things must come to an end and so we come to our real conclusion.
It is in the best (commercial ) interests of the social web to make it very easy to create fake followers as greater the number of Twitter users, the more money Twitter and the rest of its ilk charges for ads. It’s also is in the best interests of the social web that we have no way of determine a fake from a real user. It helps politicians as it make them more important in cyberspace than they really are. I seriously stopped getting women to date me when they realised that my Twitter followers was around 300. We must realise that a large majority of Twitter users will not tweet, they are readers nor writers. If politicians hired the right technology hackers, they will never ever get caught while massing millions of fake followers. Our Internet population will triple from 120 million today to at least 400 million in the next 1000 days thanks to 4G and this problem of fake followers or fake identities or fake tweets or fake anything will never ever be resolved. This emboldens all of us to say what we want about anyone or anything on Twitter and the social web as verification of any type is a miracle and we all know when the last miracle too place.
My last two bits: Modi’s followers are as genuine or as fake as Tharoor’s followers are. Take your pick by doing the obvious, by tweeting.
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Phew! That’s the one-word response we had on reading Vijay Mukhi’s ‘PoliTech’ column today. The information on how many followers that Narendra Modi and Shashi Tharoor have is known to everyone. However, the digging in that Mr Mukhi has done in his analysis is an eye-opener.
By Ritu Midha