Trump: Something Something Fake News

August 1, 2017 Crackpots, Idiocracy

The Washington Post recently busted that 110 million followers number:



One can debate whether Trump’s Twitter feed has been terribly effective at making him successful, post-election. But one cannot debate the assertion that Trump has 110 million people following him on social media, because he doesn’t. Trump has at least two accounts on four of the biggest social media platforms. Combined, those accounts have about 93.1 million followers. Here they are, in descending order of number of followers.

Clearly, 93.1 million is a smaller number than 110 million. So where do those other 17-odd million come from? Some come from Snapchat, but generally, it’s not clear. The term “social media” is nebulous. Does YouTube count? Trump’s account there has about 109,000 followers. What about Reddit? The virulent pro-Trump community r/The_Donald claims 6 million subscribers, but that’s not social media, and that figure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trump’s not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.

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