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Fairfax media Turnbull taunt falls flat


Big News Network.com
28 Aug 2016

SYDNEY, Australia - Fairfax newspapers on Sunday weighed in on Australian Prime Minister Malcoilm Tunbull's Twitter account, claiming nearly half his followers are fake.

TwitterAudit, it says has evaluated that only 54% of Turnbull's followers are real.

TwitterAudit, is a promotional website, not affiliarted with Twitter in any way. It says each audit takes a random sample of 5,000 Twitter followers and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweetsdate of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. They say they use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. As TwitterAudit admits the  scoring method is not perfect but they say it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.

In other words they are guessing, and clearly have not determined the bonefides of any of the followers.

Worse for Fairfax is that The Sydney Morning Herald, its flagship newspaper in Australia which ran the story in its Sun-Herald, Sunday edition, has the exact same score as Mr Turnbull - 54%. Even worse again, Fairfax's Melbourne stablemate has a score of 46%, meaning more than half its followers are considered 'fake' by TwitterAudit. Admittedly, TwitterAudit's last review of the Fairfax newspapers was three years ago whereas the Turnbull audit is only three days old. The company does not specify when audits are conducted.

Fairfax's competitor, News Corp, fares little better although the Daily Telegraph polled 64% two years ago while The Australian did poorly at 51% and the Melbourne newspaper The Herald Sun did worst of all at 39%.

So while Fairfax believs the prime minister is faring badly on Twitter, he is doing no worse than the Australian media of which Fairfax is a dominant part.

 

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