This past Sunday evening, the first reports emerged of a rapid and unusual increase in the number of Twitter and Facebook followers for Australian Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. An overall increase in followers during an election campaign is far from surprising, as our analysis of the follower growth curve for leading Australian politicians from June shows, but this latest increase happened a little too quickly to appear genuine.
So, what happened here? Did Abbott buy himself some additional Twitter followers, or did some 60,000-odd Twitter users suddenly develop a burning desire to follow Abbott’s tweets?
To shed some more light on those questions, this Monday morning we quickly re-ran our follower analysis for Abbott’s account. I’ve explained the overall approach to doing this in an earlier post, but here’s quick re-cap: the following graph shows the relative age of the Twitter accounts following @TonyAbbottMHR, plotted in the order in which they followed the account. In doing so, we draw on the fact that Twitter helpfully lists followers in the order of what we have come to call their ‘accession’: from Abbott’s first followers all the way through to his most recent.
What results from this analysis is the following graph. A clear shape emerges, and the top edge of that graph shows the approximate number of followers Abbott had at any one point in time (with the caveat that we cannot see any past followers who have unfollowed Abbott again). The flatter the curve, the more rapid the follower accession. (As always, click the graph for a larger version.)
Especially in recent times, the curve is fairly flat, but not entirely horizontal. Also, there are long vertical tails below each point of the curve, indicating that at any one point in time Abbott added a mixture of well-established as well as newbie Twitter users.
However, that situation changes for Abbott’s most recent followers, to the right of the graph – users who joined in the last few days. Here, the follower accession curve is virtually horizontal, indicating a very rapid growth in new followers – and those new follower accounts were created almost without exception within the last 60 days or so (in fact, the creation dates are so systematic that there appear to be two banks of followers, one at around 60 days of age, the other about half as old).
This is irrefutably dodgy. There is no logical explanation for some 60,000 Twitter users, all of whom joined the platform at almost exactly the same time, to follow @TonyAbbottMHR in unison. The only realistic scenarios are that a) someone from the pro-Abbott camp decided to boost the Opposition Leader’s numbers on Twitter by buying his account some fake followers, b) one of his opponents did the same in order to exploit the publicity which has resulted from this suspicious influx, or c) independent of any political motives, a fake follower network operator decided to give their zombie accounts some appearance of legitimacy by connecting them with a genuine, prominent account.
Time for a factcheck, then – did Abbott buy himself some Twitter followers? We cannot say for sure; given how obviously these new followers stand out from the crowd, it would be a very ill-considered and simple-minded attempt to claim some popularity on Twitter. It’s just as likely that these followers were bought to hurt Abbott as that they were meant to help him. Are they fake? Yes, undoubtedly; a follower accession curve as we see it above does not occur in the wild.
And it looks like the Abbott camp, as well as Twitter itself, have also realised this: from the heady heights of 210,000+ on Monday morning, Abbott’s numbers have dropped down again to some 170,000 by Monday night, as Twitter has removed, blocked, and/or deleted these fake accounts.
We have, incidentally, seen a similar phenomenon for Kevin Rudd’s @KRuddMP account in the past, too, as I’ve noted in a previous post. Rudd’s numbers grew remarkably quickly between late June 2009 and late January 2010, leading to similar suspicions of follower buying at the time. Here’s Rudd’s follower accession curve:
However, the most likely explanation for the substantial number of followers which Rudd added during that time is a little more complicated: in June 2009, Twitter changed its account sign-up procedures and increasingly pushed new users to start following prominent Twitter celebrities immediately, as part of the account creation process. For a while, you could hardly create a new Twitter account without following at least a handful of these suggested users.
As it turned out, Kevin Rudd – then as again now the Prime Minister, of course – was one of these suggested users, and benefitted immensely from such free promotion: he added over 600,000 followers to his account. And again, those 600,000+ are only that subset of all new followers from that period who are still following Rudd today; many more might have followed him at the time and unfollowed later.
In Rudd’s case, then, we can say with some certainty that his numbers may have been (and continue to be) inflated by such unexpected effects of platform functionality, but that fake followers do not play a significant role in his case. For Abbott’s account, the situation is clearly different, even if we may never find out who was responsible for this sudden flurry of new followers.