Fake news?
Donald Trump’s Twitter account is arguably the most controversial and most talked-about account on the social media platform, so it is understandable why he has such a huge following (being the president of the United States probably helps, too).
As of Tuesday evening, Trump had 31 million followers and while that seems like nothing to report home about for one of the most famous people on the planet, his following has jumped by five million in the last couple of days.
Five million in a few days is quite a lot of new followers and it turns out that many of Trump’s recent followers may not actually be real people.
Scrolling through Trump’s latest followers, you will be greeted with pages upon pages of accounts with no pictures, no followers, no posts and rather strange names.
Also, these accounts were only created in May 2017.
It would be very time consuming to investigate every single follower that Trump has, but according to Twitter Audit, almost half of his 31 million followers are in fact fake.
Each audit takes a sample of up to 5,000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on the number of tweets, date of the last tweet and ratio of followers to friends. Therefore, it could be just a case that the audit had under 2,500 of fake accounts in their sample.
Maybe it’s a plot by Trump to overtake former President Barack Obama, who is sitting pretty on Twitter with 89 million followers.
Nearly there Donald, 31 million down, 58 million to go.
