CNN Caught Purchasing 16 Million Fake Twitter Followers

February 25, 2017 Sean Adl-Tabatabai News, US 1

CNN purchases 16 million fake Twitter followers

Internet sleuths have discovered that over 50% of CNN’s Twitter followers – around 16 million of them – are fake accounts purchased by CNN.

A push by the network to try and discredit the Project Veritas CNN leaks prompted internet detectives to examine CNN’s shady social media strategy.

Infowars.com reports:

An audit of CNN’s Twitter account reveals that their most recent rating reflected an abysmal 46% real followers, 54% fake.

CNNAUDIT

It should be noted that this audit reflects information from four years ago, when CNN had just over 30 million followers; they now have 32 million followers.

An analysis of recent CNN tweets show that they rarely garner more than 1,000 retweets or 2,000 likes, with the average post receiving less than 500 retweets – and some as low as 25 retweets.

In contrast, President Donald Trump, who currently has 25.7 million followers and an audit rating of 73% real followers, regularly eclipses 25,000 retweets and 100,000 likes – sometimes breaking the 300,000 mark for likes.

Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, with a mere 512,000 followers, does traffic of which CNN can only dream – while poking fun at CNN.

A related interesting note regards CNN anchor, Chris Cuomo, who currently has 1.19 million followers.

Twitter users ran audits on his account, as of midday February 23, and returned a score of 59% real followers out of 1.19 million – of which they made him well aware.

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https://twitter.com/Fitzillo/status/834908717636280322

Just hours later, Cuomo’s score was mysteriously upgraded to 96% – despite almost no change in the number of total followers.

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James O’Keefe and Project Veritas have released nearly 120 hours of audio from inside CNN, and they need your help to comb through it. Learn more HERE.

Sean Adl-Tabatabai
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Sean Adl-Tabatabai

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  • Josh Stern

    A huge portion of all notification type activity on Twitter is fake in one way or another. This article focuses on fake followers. In Summer of 2015, I noticed that one could screen for the accounts on Twitter that were following more than 200K other accounts. Over 90% of these were Arabic language accounts from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc. And they were all bots. One could follow one and then others would follow you. They would send pretend messages in broken Arabic. When translated, it seemed that many of the messages had been created by software working from phonetic recognition of English recordings. So there were mistakes in the broken Arabic translation that only made sense in terms of machien mistakes recognizing, say, a heavy Australian accent in the original recording. There are many commercial services on Twitter that sell “followers”. A lot of the tweeting activity is also robotic in paid service in nature. To estimate the actual percentage of real activity in all the tweeting, one would need to figure out how many accounts could be traced to a real person or business in the world and then estimate the number of those that had any kind of awareness or recognition of what was actually tweeted on their behalf or who they followed. The estimate of the resulting “real” percentage would be very low. So how does Twitter earn ad revenue? Partly by deceptive online metrics, and partly based on being playing a role as a CIA front company (yes, even though it went public), that does not need to have real clients. It is subsidized for other reasons.