Almost half of Matt Hancock's Twitter followers are 'fake'

West Suffolk MP and former health secretary Matt Hancock has made the headlines recently after signing up to be a contestant on the ITV reality TV show I’m A Celebrity.

He claimed his appearance on the show is to let people see the “human” behind the politician – something that is unlikely to be happening on Twitter as it’s revealed almost half of Hancock’s Twitter followers are “fake”.

The results come after the Bespoke Software Development Company underwent a piece of research to find out which UK MPs have the largest proportion of fake followers on Twitter.

To do this, the experts used SparkToro's online fake follower audit tool to analyse each MP's Twitter account to find the total amount of fake followers and the equivalent percentage. The tool "looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/bot/low quality accounts to return a percentage of followers that are thought to be fake".

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Fake followers by the proportion of total followers ranked as the following:

1. Tim Farron (Lib Dems) – 51.60 per cent.
2. Matt Hancock (Conservative) – 43.30 per cent.
3. Dominic Raab (Conservative) – 41.30 per cent.
4. Tulip Siddiq (Labour) – 41.10 per cent.
5. Michael Gove (Conservative) – 39.60 per cent.
6. Boris Johnson (Conservative) – 36.40 per cent.
7. Jess Phillips (Labour) – 36.30 per cent.
8. Rishi Sunak (Conservative) – 35.90 per cent.
9. David Davis (Conservative) – 35.30 per cent.
10. Jeremy Hunt (Conservative) – 35.10 per cent.

The research found that, of the 160 most followed MPs that they analysed, the Conservative Party had the highest overall percentage of fake Twitter followers.

There is no suggestion that any of those with high numbers of fake followers did anything untoward to accumulate them.

With a combined Twitter following of more than 14 million, the party’s MPs have the highest overall number of fake accounts following them at 4,578,033. That stands at a fake follower percentage of 32.29 per cent.

It remains to be seen whether fake accounts are something Elon Musk will tackle as part of his thus far dramatic Twitter takeover.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.