Recent searches
Search options
#Trump gained #20m new #followers (real and…less real, I’m sure) in the first 2 hours since #Musk reinstated him this morning
If the growth in his followers is mainly organic, the implications are huge as (at the risk of stating the obvious) I think that we’ll witness a new far more dangerous level of social media (direct) impact on democracy.
Why is this different than before?
Because now one of the biggest social media outlets is #owned by Musk giving him direct power to influence the opinion of his followers who are religiously blinded by his “success”.
Twitter’s ability to moderate some of that is gone.
@AlexaInTheWoods @eran This is false. His account is being restored with his original followers. People aren’t rushing to follow him.
Yes, I have read the Wikipedia bit about his followers too, however, would Twitter, knowingly, keep 30m bots all this time? And would they just “resurface” now with Trump being live? That’s the bit I can’t quite get my head around.
I must admit my knowledge of Twitter technical side is very limited and I’m happy to be corrected on my assessment 
if his growth in followers is not organic.
All I know is that he had 50m followers at 10am and by noon the number was over 70m.
@AlexaInTheWoods @eran As I said they are simply restoring his account. Twitter always behaves like this when you re-enable an account. It will restore to whatever followers he had minus any accounts that no longer exist.
Ok, just to make sure I understand this, let’s take it step by step
- he had 88m followers when they removed his account from Twitter (30m of which Twitter identified as bots)
- this morning at 10am he had 52m
- at noon it was 72m
- I just checked and now he’s at 83m
Are you saying that this is a gradual restoration of his initial 88m followers? If so, why would Twitter restore the 30m bot followers it previously had knowledge of? I’m just trying to get my head around this
@AlexaInTheWoods @eran Yes that’s exactly what’s happening. You can’t seriously believe 80m people followed him overnight? They have just restored his account. Not sure where you’re getting the 30m bot number from.
My posts are based on an analysis ran by @randfish a few years ago where he identified the proportion of Trump (and other leaders and public people) followers as bots or fake accounts.
If what you say is right, and this is simply a restoration of his account, then Trump’s number of followers should not increase much beyond 90m over the next few days. I’m really curious to see what happens.