Trevor can’t tell a fake Twitter account from the real thing
Trevor Mallard has got all excited. he has blogged a tweet from @NZNational stating (falsely) that the mock town hall meeting in National’s opening address was a real one.
The only problem with Trevor’s “gotcha” expose is that @NZNational is a fake account, probably run by one of his activists.
Now I’ll give Trevor the benefit of the doubt, and assume he didn’t know it was a fake account, rather than the alternative which is he was deliberately setting out to deceive.
But so Trevor doesn’t make himself look foolish in future, here’s some things to look at, to work out a fake account.
- Check their full description on their homepage.
- Look at some of their recent tweets. Do they look like the tweets you would expect from that person or organisation
- Check out how many followers they have. As this one had only 91 followers, pretty obvious it is a fake.
It’s not that hard to work out real and fake accounts. The only time I had difficulty was working out the difference between the parody Catherine Delahunty account and the real one.
UPDATE: I have had it pointed out to me that Mallard in fact knew the account was not rea as he had been told multiple times on Twitterl, so it was a deliberate attempt to deceive. Nice to know Labour’s campaign manager continues high normal high ethical standards. It’s a silly strategy because it means the public and journalists will distrust stuff on Red Alert.