We Need to Talk About Rupert
Following on from my post about the virtual leg-up that Reform are being given by the media, something else came to my attention this week.
TL;DR - Rupert Lowe is, regularly, receiving much higher engagement on Twitter/X than Katy Perry, despite having ≈ 105,106,400 fewer followers. Perhaps there is something odd afoot.
The political editor of The Sun newspaper, Harry Cole, posted on Twitter/X at the weekend about Rupert Lowe. He’d written a glowing article about him in his newspaper and was at pains to highlight his massive social media engagement.
This didn't sit right with me, so I decided to take a look into Lowe’s posts on Twitter/X, compared to his, far better known, compatriot - Nigel Farage.
I began by looking at their posts over a period of a year. I wanted to understand the impact of each MP and their posts on Twitter/X. That would give me a comparison to look, in a more granular fashion, at Rupert Lowe. I will follow this up with other parties and MPs throughout the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled.
Before we continue, I need to point out that Lowe blocked me last year because I replied under a post of his with an article I'd written; the article suggests that Reform are, very much, still UKIP. If anyone has seen my posts, you'll know that I am never abusive and always polite, so I must have touched a nerve with that reply.
My very first red flag for Rupert Lowe is that his posts before December 10th 2024 seem to have been deleted [at the time of writing]. This is odd, to say the least.
He has, according to Twitter, posted fourteen thousand times. It is unclear whether this includes the deleted data, but I think it must. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and posted, a lowly, 19,700 times. While Mr Lowe is definitely a prolific tweeter, I don't think that even he has bashed out 14,000 in two months.
I had to come up with a metric that would narrow down the posts, something that could give me a readable dataset, that would actually mean something; I chose Likes per post in the first instance. At first, I ran Likes per post from 10,000 up to 50,000 Likes, then I counted the amount of views on each of those posts to give an idea of the engagement each MP receives.
This is a really complicated set to interpret, so I narrowed in on just posts from the 10th December 2024 [when Lowe’s posts start] until the 17th of February 2025.
I counted any posts for each MP, that received over 10,000 Likes and noted alongside it, the total views it had garnered to achieve said Likes.
It's a bit more convoluted than last week, but you'll see how it pans out in a second.
Now ... most people have heard of Nigel Farage, of course. Love him or loathe him, he's a main stage headliner in UK politics.
I don't know about you, but, until the General Election of last year, I'd barely heard of Rupert Lowe. He was a non-entity in my world. A cursory glance at his history shows some questionable banking and football dealings before becoming an MP. That story is for another time.
Let's break out X Pro, the spreadsheets and get into the fun stuff - the data.
What is striking at first glance is the sheer number of posts that Rupert Lowe puts out; sometimes over 20 per day. We know from other research and media that the Reform MPs make a handsome living from their Twitter/X monetised accounts. To receive income from Twitter/X you must have views. It’s all about those interactions. Likes mean nothing in this game.
In November of last year, Elon Musk changed the platform’s pay-out scheme to make it less easy for left-leaning accounts to make cash from him. He added in a caveat that to receive money, you must have over 500 blue tick followers. Not a huge amount but, due to the nature of the blue tick demographic, it is far more likely that right-leaning accounts sign up for them, therefore demonetising a lot of small/medium-sized, left-leaning accounts.
The difference between Farage and Lowe is initially found in the volume of posts. By narrowing it down to those that received over 10,000 Likes, we can see that Lowe amasses 170 posts, where Farage only received 37. Quite a striking difference.
The total views, therefore, are very different. Taking these popular posts in isolation, shows us that Rupert Lowe is, almost, doubling the views that Farage receives. Another red flag, I’d suggest. Rupert Lowe managed 367,466,000 views. In two months. Three hundred and sixty-seven million views.
When we look at the spread of Rupert Lowe’s posts across that timeframe, it shows some large spikes in his engagement, almost evenly distributed, but the surprising data here is the sheer size of his reach in these spikes. Several of his posts gained 30,000,000 [thirty million] views, with one over 40,000,000 [forty million] and one at almost 60,000,000 [sixty million] views. This is superstar tweet level - Katy Perry, with her 105 million followers [Rupert has 293,000], rarely reaches these levels.
For comparison, Farage has some big posts across this timeframe as well, but they're not even half as large as Lowe. He had six posts with over 10,000,000 views, compared to Lowe’s seven. His highest viewed post received 28,000,000. That doesn’t even break Rupert’s top four.
A quick word on the others … the left behinds in Reform UK’s social media war. Their deputy leader and, also prolific poster, Richard Tice only had three posts with 10,000 Likes with a maximum view count of 550,000. Lee Anderson was slightly higher with five posts hitting the magic ten thousand Likes mark; his most viewed post had 2,900,000 - a grim post depicting a noose that saw me receive a 12-hour ban for criticising it. McMurdock doesn’t come anywhere close to these types of numbers.
The battle for the heart of Reform UK is being fought on Twitter/X - if you believe some stories in the media, Rupert Lowe is lining up a campaign to remove Farage of his Emperorship and shake things up. All conjecture, of course.
So how does an ex chairman of Southampton FC, who is the fourth in line to the Reform throne, achieve these monumental post engagements? Well, I think I know. I think we all know, but cannot possibly be sure.
Is there some skulduggery afoot within the Rupert Lowe social media team? I can’t prove anything, but it seems to me that a sixty-seven-year-old, minor league politician is highly unlikely to be organically attracting views that put Katy Perry to shame.
@BylineTimes | @LBC | @SkyNews | @BBCPolitics | @reformexposed
Following on from my post about the virtual leg-up that Reform are being given by the media, something else came to my attention this week.
TL;DR - Rupert Lowe is, regularly, receiving much higher engagement on Twitter/X than Katy Perry, despite having ≈ 105,106,400 fewer followers. Perhaps there is something odd afoot.
The political editor of The Sun newspaper, Harry Cole, posted on Twitter/X at the weekend about Rupert Lowe. He’d written a glowing article about him in his newspaper and was at pains to highlight his massive social media engagement.
This didn't sit right with me, so I decided to take a look into Lowe’s posts on Twitter/X, compared to his, far better known, compatriot - Nigel Farage.
I began by looking at their posts over a period of a year. I wanted to understand the impact of each MP and their posts on Twitter/X. That would give me a comparison to look, in a more granular fashion, at Rupert Lowe. I will follow this up with other parties and MPs throughout the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled.
Before we continue, I need to point out that Lowe blocked me last year because I replied under a post of his with an article I'd written; the article suggests that Reform are, very much, still UKIP. If anyone has seen my posts, you'll know that I am never abusive and always polite, so I must have touched a nerve with that reply.
My very first red flag for Rupert Lowe is that his posts before December 10th 2024 seem to have been deleted [at the time of writing]. This is odd, to say the least.
He has, according to Twitter, posted fourteen thousand times. It is unclear whether this includes the deleted data, but I think it must. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and posted, a lowly, 19,700 times. While Mr Lowe is definitely a prolific tweeter, I don't think that even he has bashed out 14,000 in two months.
I had to come up with a metric that would narrow down the posts, something that could give me a readable dataset, that would actually mean something; I chose Likes per post in the first instance. At first, I ran Likes per post from 10,000 up to 50,000 Likes, then I counted the amount of views on each of those posts to give an idea of the engagement each MP receives.
This is a really complicated set to interpret, so I narrowed in on just posts from the 10th December 2024 [when Lowe’s posts start] until the 17th of February 2025.
I counted any posts for each MP, that received over 10,000 Likes and noted alongside it, the total views it had garnered to achieve said Likes.
It's a bit more convoluted than last week, but you'll see how it pans out in a second.
Now ... most people have heard of Nigel Farage, of course. Love him or loathe him, he's a main stage headliner in UK politics.
I don't know about you, but, until the General Election of last year, I'd barely heard of Rupert Lowe. He was a non-entity in my world. A cursory glance at his history shows some questionable banking and football dealings before becoming an MP. That story is for another time.
Let's break out X Pro, the spreadsheets and get into the fun stuff - the data.
What is striking at first glance is the sheer number of posts that Rupert Lowe puts out; sometimes over 20 per day. We know from other research and media that the Reform MPs make a handsome living from their Twitter/X monetised accounts. To receive income from Twitter/X you must have views. It’s all about those interactions. Likes mean nothing in this game.
In November of last year, Elon Musk changed the platform’s pay-out scheme to make it less easy for left-leaning accounts to make cash from him. He added in a caveat that to receive money, you must have over 500 blue tick followers. Not a huge amount but, due to the nature of the blue tick demographic, it is far more likely that right-leaning accounts sign up for them, therefore demonetising a lot of small/medium-sized, left-leaning accounts.
The difference between Farage and Lowe is initially found in the volume of posts. By narrowing it down to those that received over 10,000 Likes, we can see that Lowe amasses 170 posts, where Farage only received 37. Quite a striking difference.
The total views, therefore, are very different. Taking these popular posts in isolation, shows us that Rupert Lowe is, almost, doubling the views that Farage receives. Another red flag, I’d suggest. Rupert Lowe managed 367,466,000 views. In two months. Three hundred and sixty-seven million views.
When we look at the spread of Rupert Lowe’s posts across that timeframe, it shows some large spikes in his engagement, almost evenly distributed, but the surprising data here is the sheer size of his reach in these spikes. Several of his posts gained 30,000,000 [thirty million] views, with one over 40,000,000 [forty million] and one at almost 60,000,000 [sixty million] views. This is superstar tweet level - Katy Perry, with her 105 million followers [Rupert has 293,000], rarely reaches these levels.
For comparison, Farage has some big posts across this timeframe as well, but they're not even half as large as Lowe. He had six posts with over 10,000,000 views, compared to Lowe’s seven. His highest viewed post received 28,000,000. That doesn’t even break Rupert’s top four.
A quick word on the others … the left behinds in Reform UK’s social media war. Their deputy leader and, also prolific poster, Richard Tice only had three posts with 10,000 Likes with a maximum view count of 550,000. Lee Anderson was slightly higher with five posts hitting the magic ten thousand Likes mark; his most viewed post had 2,900,000 - a grim post depicting a noose that saw me receive a 12-hour ban for criticising it. McMurdock doesn’t come anywhere close to these types of numbers.
The battle for the heart of Reform UK is being fought on Twitter/X - if you believe some stories in the media, Rupert Lowe is lining up a campaign to remove Farage of his Emperorship and shake things up. All conjecture, of course.
So how does an ex chairman of Southampton FC, who is the fourth in line to the Reform throne, achieve these monumental post engagements? Well, I think I know. I think we all know, but cannot possibly be sure.
Is there some skulduggery afoot within the Rupert Lowe social media team? I can’t prove anything, but it seems to me that a sixty-seven-year-old, minor league politician is highly unlikely to be organically attracting views that put Katy Perry to shame.
@BylineTimes | @LBC | @SkyNews | @BBCPolitics | @reformexposed
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