Fake followers: Prime Minister drowning in Twitter spam

James Riley
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 07:43

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As federal Labor gets its social media strategies in place ahead of next year’s election, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has a direct line to more than a quarter of a million followers through Twitter. And yet most won’t vote for him.

As many as 80 per cent of the KRudd devotees are not Australian citizens, living mainly in the US. Some are sex industry marketers. Some are in the cheap online pharmaceuticals business.

The Prime Minister is drowning in spam. And eventually, according to communications experts, the affront to Mr Rudd’s actual followers within his community of fakes is going to start getting in the way of his message.

Kevin Rudd is hardly the first person to attract legions of spam followers. But he is one of the more high profile Twitter users who seems to be OK with the problem.

Canberra-based communications consultant Stephen Collins, the founder of boutique agency AcidLabs, says fake followers on Twitter is a growing problem, and one that takes time-consuming, labour-intensive effort to control.

“For the PM, or for his staff, it would require a huge effort – huge – to go through (and remove) the fake followers now,” Collins said. “It is a problem, and I don’t think they were probably prepared for that.”

“But it would do them a lot of good to make the point of removing fakes. Then their community can see that they are putting in the effort, to show that it is about engagement rather than simply collecting numbers.”

Collins said the Twitter spammers could cause the PM problems – if only because it reinforced the cynicism of some in the electorate towards Mr Rudd’s populist tendencies.

Any high profile personality or political figure should be well acquainted with spam Twitter. But the better engaged deal with it, rather than letting the fakes accumulate.

“If you’re someone who is relatively noticeable or high profile, you are going to get a lot of this. Because the barriers to entry to Twitter is virtually zero, it’s easy for someone to set up hundreds or thousands profiles to sell something,” Collins said.

“And that sort of stuff is a huge turn-off, especially for people who are trying to build things organically and creating a community. But it won’t destroy Twitter. It will get better at filtering followers, just like email got better at filtering spam.”

Collins says the first thing he does every morning is go through his new followers notices and work out who’s real and who not, and deal with it as it emerges. It’s time consuming.

“For the Prime Minister, who has a communications staff, this is one of those jobs that they really should be paying attention to,” he said.

Mr Rudd’s office did not return iTWire calls.