Fakers is an app that can tell you how many fake followers (spam accounts) you have on Twitter. It may or may not be useful, for example I tried it and found 1% of my followers were fake, 11% inactive and 88% were ‘good’. Of what value this information is, I can’t say. However, the app is useful for seeing if more prominent people are buying up fake account followers to boost their Twitter numbers.
Recently US presidential candidate Mitt Romney was accused of buying a tonne of fake Twitter followers. Using the fakers app, Digital Times was able to find out that 12% of Romney’s 850,000 Twitter followers are fake, 30% are inactive and 58% are good.
Statuspeople, the developer of the app explains how it works: We take 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.
On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts.
