NEARLY HALF OF DONALD TRUMP'S TWITTER FOLLOWERS ARE FAKE ACCOUNTS AND BOTS

[displacedtexan]

Newsweek put the headline in all caps.

Anyone can amass an exorbitant number of Twitter followers. You don't even have to be famous. All you have to do is pay for them. The comedian Joe Mande currently has a healthy 1.01 million followers, but his bio contains a caveat: "twitter is trash, facebook's the devil, i bought a million followers for like $400 none of this shit matters antarctica is melting."

Mande even explained the stunt last November in The New Yorker. "The simplest way to tell who’s winning the Twitter game is by counting followers," he wrote. "The biggest celebrity accounts—Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga—seem to have millions of followers. But in 2012 I learned that only a portion of those are real humans; some are 'bots,' artificially created to boost an account’s popularity. Immediately, I knew that I had found my calling."

Because Donald Trump is the president of the United States and the most famous person on the planet, one wouldn't think he would need to employ a bot to boost his Twitter following. It appears, however, he might have done just that. As screenwriter John Niven pointed out Tuesday morning, Trump's Twitter account saw an unusual spike in followers over the weekend, many of which appear to have been created artificially.

Trump currently has 31 million followers and, sure enough, if you browse through them you will find an unusual number of tweet-less, picture-less accounts that joined the service in May 2017. If you're still curious, you can enter Trump's handle, @realDonaldTrump, into Twitter Audit, a service that assesses the authenticity of one's followers, and find that only 51 percent of Trump's are real.

Duh. Left out my reason for reposting this: Din't be discouraged by fake numbers. Trump is not popular! Not anywhere!

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-617873

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. FAKE! Like tRump himself!

[donkeypoofed]

2. Very interesting. thanks for sharing that.

[TheRealNorth]

3. I think Twitter makes some attempts to control Fake/bot accounts now

But they probably don't get them all. There was a news story in the past week that Donald Dumbass complained to the Twitter CEO because Twitter was deleting his Twitter followers (because Twitter had determined the accounts were fake/bots).

[LiberalFighter]

4. Aren't they all 400 lb men living in the basements of their mothers?

[Revanchist]

8. I'm sure that many journalists and news organizations follow him

Even if they don't want to on a personal level. He's the president and his outlandish tweets are still newsworthy.

[UTUSN]

5. K&R

[kacekwl]

6. Let's see if we can

get them over to our side.

[raccoon]

7. I totally believe this. Nt