Donald Trump likes to brag about how many followers he has on social media. But a good number of these followers are fakes: bots, spam accounts, and more. In fact, anyone on Twitter who has a lot of followers has a considerable number of fakes.
There are websites where you can check accounts to find how many fake followers there are. I tried one, Twitter Audit, and it shows the following:
Only 59% of Trump’s followers are real people, and it’s possible that a large percentage of those don’t even check Twitter very often. It’s important to keep this in mind, that these social media numbers are always inflated. (I checked my account, and about 9% of my followers are fake.)
So don’t despair too much; there aren’t really 22 million people following Donald Trump on social media, as he recently trumpeted. (See what I did there?) He conflates all his followers, assuming that none of them follow him on more than one service (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram), and so many of the accounts are bogus that the number is far lower than he claims. Which isn’t a surprise, right?