According to a new analysis, our Tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump doesn’t have as large of an online audience as he thinks, as close to half of his followers on Twitter have been found to be fake. Don’t worry, I’m sure Trump will just claim that this is fake news, and all of those bots will agree with him. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
According to new reports, “Only about 51% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers are actually real people.” That’s according to Twitter Audit, which is a service. You can take the Twitter handle of anyone, pop it in there, and see how many of their Twitter followers are real and how many are classified as bots. Now it’s not a 100% accurate, but it is pretty accurate. By contrast, Barrack Obama’s followers, about 79% of them are verified, real human beings. Now the reason this is so important is because one, first of all, we don’t know if Donald Trump actually paid to have more people follow him, which is something you can do. For about $400, you can get a million Twitter followers, but Donald Trump uses Twitter as his main platform to talk to the American public.
And when he sends out a Tweet attacking Barrack Obama, attacking Hillary Clinton, attacking journalism, and fake news, and we see all those likes and retweets going up there, we have to understand at this point, that most of those or maybe half of them, could be completely fake. Just automated bots out there who do nothing more than like and retweet and share. That’s what Donald Trump has built his entire Twitter following off of. People who aren’t real, but they’re willing to agree with him. And, to be honest, Donald Trump doesn’t seem like the kind of guy whose smart enough to know that you can go and buy Twitter followers. If he did, he’d probably have several billion Twitter followers.
What I’m guessing here, is that if that happened, it was a staffer, possibly even a family member who went out there and did this to help pad Donald Trump’s ego. Because whenever that man logs into Twitter and sees however many million followers he has, he honestly believes that those are millions of people who sit on their phones or computers all day long, waiting to see what this man has to say. He’s a guy who definitely checks the numbers. He waits there, he sits there watching, refreshes that notifications page, to see how many thousands of people are liking, how many thousands of people are sharing, because that’s all that matters to him.
It doesn’t matter what he says. All that matters is how the public responds to it and do they respond to it in a positive way? So finding out that 49% of his Twitter followers could be fake is a huge blow to Donald Trump’s ego. It doesn’t change what he’ll do on Twitter. It doesn’t even mean that he’ll acknowledge that this report is real. In fact, if he heard it, I’m sure he would call this, “Fake news.” But deep down, he would always question it from that point forward, and that’s the thing. Anything we can do to hurt Donald Trump’s ego, is a step forward, because that is really all this man has. That’s all he cares about.
So while he does all this damage to the United States, does all this damage to our reputation abroad, basically destroying alliances that have existed for decades with other countries, we can take a few shots at his ego. Because he is causing irreparable damage to the United States, or at least damage that’s going to take another decade or two to repair. He’ll be long gone by then, but we’ll still be here cleaning up his mess. So I see no problem with taking a few shots at this very fragile man’s ego, considering the damage that he’s doing to the rest of us.
