Liberal party is working with social media platform to investigate rise in fake accounts
The social media election campaign is heating up as Tony Abbott's office confirmed it is investigating a large spike in Twitter followers on Saturday night and has rejected suggestions that the party has purchased followers.
Despite the investigation, Liberal party federal director Brian Loughnane sent an email on Sunday afternoon informing supporters of the rapid increase in followers and boasting that "over the last two weeks our social communities were almost twice as engaged as Labor".
"In the last few days there has been a 70,000+ growth in Facebook likes from all across Australia for Tony Abbott's page," the email said. "The Liberal party Facebook page was the first Australian political party to reach 100,000 likes and our YouTube video 'New Hope' has received over 200,000 views."
On Sunday, the opposition leader's number of followers on the social media platform Twitter were changing rapidly, increasing by 3,000 in the morning, rising to 192,300 followers by 3pm, then dropping back by 5,000 in the next hour.
Kevin Rudd, who is an avid Twitter fan and has been assiduously cultivating voters on the platform since he was in Opposition, has 1.4m followers.
"The Liberal party has become aware that someone last night began buying fake Twitter followers for Tony Abbott's Twitter account," the Liberal party said in a statement on its Facebook page at midday on Sunday.
"We are working with Twitter now to remove the fake accounts and investigate who was behind this. The Liberal party has not purchased or artificially sought to inflate any social media numbers."
Analysis by news.com.au suggested Abbott's followers had increased by 50% since June this year, compared with a 14% increase in Rudd's followers. News.com's analysis found that 99 out of 100 new accounts following Abbott were questionable.
As the importance of social media rises with each election campaign, all parties have been working on building profiles across all social media platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
All parties publish campaign events, memes and informal photos from the campaign trail in an effort to engage voters and reinforce their daily messages.
The Liberal party, for example, tweeted a Twitter card that users could sign to "wish @TonyAbbottMHR luck in tonight's debate". The Labor party tweeted: "1564 Australians have donated to our campaign so far today. Can you help us make it 2000 tonight?"
Twitter's stream is likely to explode during the first leaders debate on Sunday night, which starts at 6.30pm.
