Most of President Barack Obama's nearly 19 million Twitter followers are probably fake, according to analysis in a New York Times report.

The Web tool "Fake Follower Check" was used to analyze the president's following the social networking site and found that about 70 percent of his followers are not real.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was also recently accused of buying Twitter followers when his account jumped by 100,000 over a single weekend.

Both the Romney and Obama campaigns deny the accusations.

Fake followers is a popular trend among politicians and other high status public figures. Buying Twitter followers is easily accomplished with the help of several services on the Internet.

Earlier in August, Jon Tilton, general manager for Advocacy Media, ran a follower check on every member of Congress using the Fake Follower tool.

He found that about 38 percent of accounts following representatives on Twitter and 42 percent of those following senators are a combination of fake and inactive accounts.