Are Donald Trump's Followers Real? Report Finds Almost Half of His Social Media Following Could Be Fake
President Donald Trump has said his social media following helped him land in the Oval Office, but a new report claims that almost half of his followers could be fake.
The Daily Dot reported that Twitter analyses of the president's accounts found that about half of his 41.3 million followers rarely tweet or have inactive accounts, and more than a quarter have accounts with no posted tweets as of October.
A quick search on Twitter audit shows that the president has about 19.7 million fake followers and 21.5 million real followers. In comparison, the website says former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has 9 million real followers and 10 million fake followers.
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Trump is not shy about promoting his social media account or boasting about his number of followers. He once claimed he had 100 million followers.
Trump, who tweets multiple times a day, called himself a “modern day president” for his use of the social media platform. Since the election, he has defended his use of Twitter by claiming it help him beat out Clinton in 2016. Voters have started to think otherwise. In a Fox News poll, 57 percent said they did not approve of the president’s tweeting.
The president has taken to Twitter to attack TV anchors, call the leader of North Korea a “rocket man” and promote his presidency.
“It's always a benefit for the president to be able to speak directly to the American people without any filter, without any bias,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday. “I think that's a positive thing.”
Trump’s Twitter account has 300,000 followers who follow only him and 18.9 million followers have not posted on the platform in a year, according to the The Daily Dot.
It’s not out of the ordinary for popular Twitter accounts to have fake followers including bots—accounts created with the sole purpose of increasing a user’s following. Trump’s fake followers have increased since the 2016 election, but so has his follower count. Journalist Yashar Ali ran a Twitter audit on Trump in January and found that 68 percent of the president’s followers were real.
Trump follows only 45 accounts himself. A scroll through his followers shows that almost every other account lacks a profile picture, a possible sign that they are fake.
