Social media researchers have found that more than 2 million of Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton's 3.6 million Twitter followers are fake or never tweet.
At least 15 percent - more than 544,000 - of Clinton's followers are completely fake, according to an analysis by Status People, one of the oldest Twitter-auditing tools, reported The Daily Mail.
Forty-one percent are considered inactive, meaning they have never tweeted or replied to any tweets, and 44 percent are real people who actively use Twitter.
A separate analysis of Clinton's Facebook page, conducted by Vocativ, found that "at least 7 percent of Clinton's Facebook fans list their hometown as Baghdad, way more than any other city in the world, including the United States."
In 2013, during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, The Huffington Post reported that the State Department spent $630,000 taxpayers dollars buying Facebook fans. Clinton left the agency as the inspector general was investigating the matter.
Buying social media followers seems to have been commonplace amongst presidential candidates since at least 2012, when Status People revealed that 41 percent of President Barack Obama's 18.6 million Twitter followers were fake, 35 percent were inactive and only 25 percent were considered authentic users.
As for Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for president in 2008 and 2012, the analysis determined that 22 percent of his 860,000 followers were fake, 33 percent inactive and 45 percent real. After his account gained more than 140,000 followers over a two-day period, his campaign was accused of buying followers, which it of course denied.
By 2013, an analysis conducted by The Daily Caller revealed Obama had amassed 20.2 million fake followers - 55 percent of his 36.8 million total followers. Michelle Obama was found to have 2 million fake followers, and 46 percent of Vice President Joe Biden's followers were fake. The White House itself had 37 percent fake followers.
Now, only 4 percent of Obama's followers are considered fake, but only after the White House worked to purge the account following the damning fake follower report, according to the Daily Mail.
