Glenn Beck has become obsessed with a recent story from The Daily Mail that reported that nearly half of the accounts that follow Hillary Clinton on Twitter are either fake or inactive and he repeatedly cited this story on his television program last night and on his radio show today as proof that Clinton is a total phony and a fraud:
She can’t even be honest about the fans on her social media sites. A study was done of her Facebook page. Again, we had to go across the ocean. We had to go to I think it was The Guardian in England to get anybody in the media to do a job. They found something odd about her followers. Seven percent of her followers were from Baghdad. That’s not really comforting or real. And on Twitter, it was revealed that 15%, about 544,000 of her Twitter followers, are bogus accounts. If her team is willing to lie about Facebook and Twitter fans and make people up just out of whole cloth, what else are they willing to lie about?
The Daily Mail based its conclusion on the results generated by two websites — StatusPeople.com and TwitterAudit.com — which claim to be able to determine just how many "real" followers any given Twitter account actually has.
We have no way of determining how accurate either of these websites or their findings are, but simply in the interest of making Beck shut up about this stupid point, we decided to run his Twitter account through them and in both cases, the number of fake or inactive followers that he has far surpassed Clinton:
