Donald Trump’s Twitter account is extremely popular, pity that half of 31-million army of followers are fake. According to the latest Twitter Audit Report, many of those accounts have no profile picture or personal info, moreover, they were created recently.
Suspicious raised after an audit of Donald Trump Twitter account’s audit, half of his followers seems to be robots. POTUS currently has 31million followers, that fact automatically making him one of the most-followed people on Twitter. In comparison, Barack Obama has more than 89million followers, and only 21 percent thought to be fake.
In Trump’s case, the fake followers either are ‘bots’, a shell account that is run by a computer instead of a real person, or corrupted users who were given paid for following Trump’s account. For example, comedian Joe Mande recently claimed he was able to purchase around 1million for $400.
In fact, analysis by Twitter Audit Report claims that just over 15million of the accounts following Trump are ‘fake’.
According to the audit reports, in April 2016, Trump had 8million of his followers (FiveThirtyEight) with eight per cent appeared to be bogus4; in January 2017, the army of followers increased up to 20million with 6million ‘fake’ profiles, or 32 percent (Yashar Ali).
Trump considers his Twitter account as the powerful political tool, he prefers to communicate directly with supporters. Ironically, even stupid ‘covfefe’ tweet he posted on Tuesday night attracted thousands of retweets and likes.
