A recent report came out on March 14 which claimed that most of the followers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Twitter are fake. But the micro-blogging site has themselves claimed that these very reports are flawed. The report gave out a list of leaders around the world with fake followers. The list also included BJP President Amit Shah among others. But the site has said the tool used for this audit report does not belong to them.

"The methodology used by 'Twitter Audit' is deeply flawed and their incorrect information should not be taken seriously," a Twitter spokesperson told IANS. The company said the reports are fake and there is no authentic trace of the information. The Twitter Audit external tool is not affiliated with the micro-blogging website. This tool takes 5000 followers and studies them based on the number of tweets, mutual followers, date of the last tweet and total number of followers. Their website also says that the scoring method is not perfect.

The report that came out on Wednesday pointed out that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had the highest number of fake followers with 67%. For PM Modi, the fake follower percentage was 61%. Modi has currently 41 million followers. The list also featured Arun Jaitley, Arvind Kejriwal, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh. This is about Indian politicians, on the global front, it was US President Donald Trump with the highest number of fake followers. But the percentage was less as compared to Indians. Trump had 39% fake followers. Amit Shah Has One Crore Twitter Followers, Second Most Followed Indian Leader On Social Media After PM Narendra Modi

Twitter acts as a great medium for public figures to keep in touch with their followers. Celebrities especially make great use of the medium to update their fans about their life. The social media platform is also used as a messenger to give out important updates with the masses. The confirmation by Twitter about fake followers is important considering a lot of people just believe what comes up on the internet.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 15, 2018 11:18 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).