Is Trump Buying Fake Twitter Followers?

Newsweek reports:

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.”

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 unusal 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 unusal 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.

It appears that Trump has gained about eight million fake followers since January.

Trump's Twitter acc has suddenly gained 3 mil followers and has been blocking lots of people. New followers look like this… pic.twitter.com/uzYkeNsjUC

— John Niven (@NivenJ1) May 30, 2017