Nearly Half of Donald Trump's Twitter Followers Are Fake Accounts and Bots - Polidicks

[url=http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-twitter-followers-fake-617873]Source[/url] [QUOTE]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." Mande even explained the stunt last November in The New Yorker. "The simplest way to tell who’s winning the Twitter game is by counting followers," he wrote. "The biggest celebrity accounts—Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga—seem to have millions of followers. But in 2012 I learned that only a portion of those are real humans; some are 'bots,' artificially created to boost an account’s popularity. Immediately, I knew that I had found my calling." 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. [media]https://twitter.com/NivenJ1/status/869547606942371840[/media] Trump currently has 31 million followers and, sure enough, if you browse through them you will find an unusual 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.[/QUOTE]

I wonder what other politicians have twitter accounts filled with fake accounts. Like, how does this compare to Obama etc.

[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;52292682]I wonder what other politicians have twitter accounts filled with fake accounts. Like, how does this compare to Obama etc.[/QUOTE] They mention obama later on [QUOTE]In case you're wondering, 79 percent of Obama's followers are real.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Lambeth;52292687]They mention obama later on[/QUOTE] That's still shamefully low. Why does Twitter have so many bots?

[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;52292696]That's still shamefully low. Why does Twitter have so many bots?[/QUOTE] Because it's painfully easy to create plugins for Twitter since they encourage developer interaction through their Twitter API.

[QUOTE=hippowombat;52292709]Because it's painfully easy to create plugins for Twitter since they encourage developer interaction through their Twitter API.[/QUOTE] Also twitter moderation is pretty lax

It makes me wonder how many of these were actually deliberately boosted by someone looking out for his Twitter numbers, and how many of them are the cult of personality creating empty duplicate accounts and following him with them of their own volition. Not really sure which is a more depressing thought.

The recent surge of bots is pretty likely to have been bought for Donny, but I wonder how many bots follow a President simply as camouflage, so they look less fake when they're sold as followers to someone else? Like, a user with zero tweets who follows only me is clearly a bot. A user with zero tweets following me, POTUS, a couple other dumb celebrities and a news bot is less certain. Maybe I bought some higher-quality bot followers, maybe it's just people who use Twitter as a bad reinvention of the RSS feed.

Couldn't these bots be used in an offensive way to lower someone's reputation? Not implying anything though.

I'm not surprised. When I had a twitter, I only had like ~20 followers, and 3 of them were bots. I remember a study saying that a lot of large people on Twitter have a not small of their followers being bots.

It's super easy and cheap to bot in Twitter, that's why. I could spend $20 and get over 2,000 followers in the blink of an eye. It's not that hard.

Most people's twtters accounts tons of fake accounts following them so who cares.

I have something like 200 bot followers who cares

This is true for literally all Twitter accounts...

Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media]

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] Is he having a stroke or something mid-sentence? :huh:

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] In the event that Tweet gets deleted, I took the precaution of taking, saving, and uploading a picture of it. [t]https://files.catbox.moe/j5nlq6.png[/t]

[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;52294125]In the event that Tweet gets deleted, I took the precaution of taking, saving, and uploading a picture of it. [t]https://files.catbox.moe/j5nlq6.png[/t][/QUOTE] I'm guessing someone saw him with the phone and started fighting Trump for it.

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] I'm in tears.

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] i'm imagining him in the white house frustrated and red-faced, yelling into another room asking if anyone knows how to fix the twitter

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] haha what the actual fuck, did the russians off him mid sentence?

Dude had a stroke midtweet

[QUOTE=Omilinon;52293075]It's super easy and cheap to bot in Twitter, that's why. I could spend $20 and get over 2,000 followers in the blink of an eye. It's not that hard.[/QUOTE] How

[QUOTE=Sheer Visor;52294248]haha what the actual fuck, did the russians off him mid sentence?[/QUOTE] It was the DNC :tinfoil:

[QUOTE=ROFLBURGER;52294081]Trump's response to this [media]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288[/media][/QUOTE] I Agree Mr.President!

[QUOTE=Snapster;52294371]I Agree Mr.President![/QUOTE] how could you not? there's only one way to go on about this and that is fsadfa

[QUOTE=Zukriuchen;52294491]how could you not? there's only one way to go on about this and that is fsadfa[/QUOTE] I'd say it's more along the lines of this: :asdfghjkl;':

[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;52294125]In the event that Tweet gets deleted, I took the precaution of taking, saving, and uploading a picture of it. [t]https://files.catbox.moe/j5nlq6.png[/t][/QUOTE] In the event people start saying that picture was doctored or some dumb shit like that, someone archived it: [url]http://archive.is/ZQoIa[/url]

[QUOTE=Sockpuppetss;52294295]How[/QUOTE] literally google "buy twitter followers" also there are just random legions of bots that will randomly follow random accounts 24/7 for, I assume, mass data collection. ie; I recently made a new twitter account just post garbage for some people to check out and it has a bunch of random arabic-name accounts following it. most seem to randomly spam follows and make a fake timeline of gibberish tweets.