Donald Trump’s Fake Twitter Followers: How Do Other Most-Followed Personalities Stack Up?

If the number of followers on Twitter is any yardstick for measuring someone’s popularity, it may be an extremely flawed measure, according to data thrown up by a website that claims to check how many of those followers are real. For instance, after President Donald Trump gained 3 million new followers in the past few days, which amount to almost 10 percent of the total followers on his personal Twitter account, twitteraudit.com says almost half of them are fake.

But is Trump unique among personalities with massive Twitter followings to have so many fake accounts following him? Going by data on Twitter Audit (Newsweek was the first to access and report the Trump data Tuesday), the phenomenon is really common.

For instance, Twitter’s most-followed celebrity, musician Katy Perry has over 99 million followers (compared to Trump’s 31 million, of which 15 million are allegedly fake). According to the auditing website, only 32 percent of Perry’s followers are real, which means there are almost 67 million fake Twitter accounts that purportedly track her every tweet.

Justin Bieber, also a musician, comes in at second spot on the list of most popular celebrities on Twitter, with a total of over 95 million followers, of which the audit tool claims almost 57 million are fake.

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If those numbers are right, then Bieber actually has more real people following him on Twitter than Perry does. And they are both completely outdone by former President Barack Obama — his account is the third-most followed on Twitter — whose real followers account for 79 percent of the total, and add up to over 70 million people. But the top spot for real followers still rests with a musician.

Taylor Swift, who has a total of over 84 million followers and the fourth-most followed Twitter account, has the highest number of real followers, according to Twitter Audit. A relatively very high 88 percent of her followers are real, amounting to over 74 million people and putting her comfortably on top, considering the fifth-most followed celebrity on Twitter, Rihanna, has a total of 73.3 million followers.

It is something of a commentary on the nature of social media and its users that Obama is the only person or company who is not related to entertainment who finds himself in the top 10 of the list of most followed Twitter accounts. The next time a person makes an appearance on the unaudited list is at the thirteenth place, and that is soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, with a total of 52.7 million followers.

Trump, who appears at the thirty-fourth place on the unaudited list, is the first politician in the top 50, followed closely by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has 30.3 million followers and the only other politician in the top 50. According to the audit tool, his score of 46 percent real followers is worse than Trump’s 51 percent.

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The audit tool is updated for different accounts at different points in time. So, while Trump’s data was refreshed only a few hours ago, Perry’s was last updated over a week ago while Bieber’s was last checked four days ago. Obama’s account was refreshed four and a half months back, Swift’s two weeks ago and Modi’s almost four months ago.

The website, which says it has been “exposing Twitter fraud since 2012,” explains its methodology, which it admits is not an exact science.

“This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”

There are a number of services and businesses that offer to increase the number of followers you have on social media platforms, for a price. For instance, there are businesses that will get you 1,000 new Twitter followers for about $15. The more you spend, the more the perceived popularity, at least insofar as reflected in anonymous numbers on your social media accounts. These services also extend to “likes” on Facebook and followers on Instagram.