Image courtesy MittRomney.com

Buying fake Twitter followers to boost your credibility is nothing new, but could the same tactic also be used in reverse – e.g., to smear your rivals in public?

Following the revelation that Mitt Romney gained an astonishing 140,000 new followers over the weekend, critics were quick to accuse the Republican candidate of purchasing fake followers in order to pad his numbers – allegations that were immediately refuted by Romney’s team, who said that the followers were likely added by someone else trying to tarnish his reputation.

Interestingly, Romney isn’t the only high profile politician to suddenly get a whole lot trendier. British Member of Parliament Louise Mensch also seems to have acquired a large number of illegitimate followers this week – starting on Monday, her following has almost doubled overnight, rising from 60,000 up to 80,000 by Tuesday, with another 20,000 added just today, taking her tally up to slightly over 100,000, all in the space of 48 hours.

This sudden spate of new Twitter lovers comes just as Status People, a relatively unknown social media management platform, released a new tool that apparently shows what percentage of a person’s Twitter followers are fake.

Right at the top of Status People’s ‘Wall of Shame’ sits Louise Mensch, with an estimated 97% of her Twitter following alleged to be from fake accounts.

Can this really be true? Is the British Queen of ‘Chic Lit’ (Mensch is also an author) really such a social media dunce that she would resort to such foolishness?

Not likely, considering that among her many achievements, she has also managed to co-found her very own social media network. If Status People’s estimations are correct, Mensch’s true followers would number only a mere 3,000 or so, which seems just as unlikely…

Taking a deeper look at how Status People calculates its figures reveals that something altogether more sinister might be happening with Mensch’s Twitter account.

Status People defines “fake followers” as any account that appears to be a spam account. Now take a good look at Mensch’s account, scroll down her list of followers a bit and you’ll see for yourself dozens of followers that would appear to be obvious bots – these accounts either have stolen photos, or no photo at all, they follow a maximum of three to five people at the most, they all have exactly 97 followers, and they haven’t made a single tweet themselves.

But there’s one crucial problem with Status People’s formula – take a look at the small print and you’ll see that they only take into account a person’s 10,000 most recent followers when making their calculations. Of course, for anyone who has suddenly accumulated 40,000 fake followers in the last 48 hours, this is going to leave them looking a little red-faced.

So does Mensch have 100,000 fake followers? Pretty unlikely, but she definitely has around 40,000, which leaves us to ponder the question, where did they come from?

Mensch herself seems almighty pissed off at the revelation (just read her latest tweets), and to be honest, it does seem unlikely that she’d do something so foolish when the risk of damaging her reputation is obviously so great.

Could it be that she (and possibly Romney as well) is instead the victim of some kind of smear campaign, wherein some political rival of hers has gone and bought all of those fake followers just to embarrass her? Or worse, is it possible that some relatively unheard of start-up looking to make a name for itself would manipulate things to ensure it had someone famous on its Wall of Shame?

I think Status People probably have some explaining to do…