Report: Number of Obama’s Fake Twitter Followers Dwarfs Romney’s

President Barack Obama apparently has a huge lead over GOP opponent Mitt Romney in a category he wishes he didn’t – fake Twitter followers.

An analysis from StatusPeople, a social web consulting firm, found that 41 percent of Obama’s Twitter followers are fake, compared to only 12 percent for Romney, The Hill reports.

Of course Obama is working from a vastly bigger base — 18.6 million Twitter followers versus just 857,260 for Romney. But that still means Obama has about 7.6 million fake followers, compared to only about 103,000 for Romney.

The report also found that 29 percent, or about 5.4 million, of Obama’s Twitterati are inactive, and only 30 percent, or 5.6 million, are true followers. For Romney, 30 percent, or about 257,000, of his followers are inactive, and 58 percent, or about 497,000, are real.

To be sure, StatusPeople acknowledges the limits of its survey. It analyzes only a sample of an account’s followers rather than the full load. So for Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers, which obviously includes both Romney’s and Obama’s, “the tool will still provide good insight, but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base,” the firm says.

The Romney camp last month denied allegations that it paid for fake Twitter followers, after the number of his Twitterati suddenly surged. A report from Internet security firm Barracuda Labs earlier this month calculated that about 15 percent of Romney’s followers are fake.