(Credit: Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)
Twitter users who want to know how many spammy or "fake" accounts are following them can check out a new service called Fake Follower Check.
Designed by a group named StatusPeople, the service looks at your Twitter account to scan a certain number of followers. In return, it tells how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. In my instance, it informed me that 77 percent of the accounts were good, 19 percent inactive, and 4 percent fake.
You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and the Fake Follower Check displays its percentages.
Based on my actual number of Twitter followers, I determined that around 175 accounts are considered fake. But short of scouring through all my Twitter followers, I obviously can't confirm if that number is accurate.
Okay, so how do the people behind StatusPeople arrive at their results?
The group says it looks at a sample of your followers, up to 500 accounts, depending on how popular you are. It then determines which ones may be spam accounts based on certain criteria. Accounts that have few or no followers and few or no tweets are suspect. Spammers also tend to follow a huge number of other accounts.
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