This morning, “news” started circulating the Twitterverse that Donald Trump had gained 5 million followers in 3 days. The claims began when “Jester,” a Twitter hacktivist, posted a Tweet claiming that.
Specifically, Jester claims that one account, @realDonaldTrump, has gained 5 million followers in less than 3 days. I debunked this in a twitter thread earlier today, and thought I’d share my results here. I should note that I accidentally @ tagged a novelty Jester account in the first Tweet of my thread, but the claim WAS made by the real Jester account, as seen above.
The original Twitter thread can be accessed below, but I’ll go ahead and include all the relevant info here, too.
Let’s start by looking at the @realDonaldTrump account. Thankfully, this account has been archived multiple times a day either on archive.org or archive.is for months. These archives are not screenshots, but actual fully coded webpage archives of the actual Twitter profiles as they appeared on the days in question.
May 1st on @realDonaldTrump account: 28.5 million followers. Archived here: archive.is/…
May 21st on @realDonaldTrump account: 30 million followers. Archived here: archive.is/…
May 30th on @realDonaldTrump account: 30.9 million followers. Archived here: archive.is/…
So, that’s a change of 2.37 million followers in one month. Only 0.9 million of those were in the last nine days (I was trying to give Jester a little leeway to be fair).
Next, let’s look at the official @POTUS account. This account has also been archived multiple times a day.
May 1st on @POTUS: 16.9 million followers. Archived here: web.archive.org/…
May 21st on @POTUS: 17.7 million followers Archived here: web.archive.org/…
May 30th on @POTUS: 18.1 million followers. Archived here: archive.is/…
That is a change of 1.26 million followers in one month. Only 0.4 million of those were in the last nine days (comparing apples to apples here with his personal account).
Add these totals together, and you get a change of 3.63 million followers added in one month. 1.3 million of those were in the last nine days.
Now, I’m not saying that’s a normal amount, because I don’t know what his normal growth rate is. Undoubtedly, a large number of his new followers will be bots, because Twitter bots generally follow the “suggested accounts” during creation, and @realDonaldTrump is one of those for a lot of locations. They could also be bot accounts created specifically to follow Trump, which is a distinct possibility. I’m not debating any of those points.
My point is, even by adding both accounts together (Jester’s claim was that @realDonaldTrump alone had gained 5 million) and looking at the total for the whole month, it’s not even close to 5 million new followers, let alone in the last three days alone. Jester lied. And this isn’t the first time he has done so.
The night of the Manchester Arena bombing, Jester posted a fake photo from 4chan, which he claimed showed someone had made a threat on a “known jihadist recruitment site” the day before the attack. In reality, it was a doctored photo which had been created from a completely innocent post about Palestinian history on the muslim forum Ummah.com. This photo resulted in a witch hunt which had people doxxing the username shown on the fake picture.
I have a full thread about that incident here:
I had to make a thread about it, because when I first commented on Jester’s original post sharing the image that it had been faked, he immediately blocked me. He also blocked others who later brought up the same things. That means anyone who subscribes to Jester’s BlockTogether list now has myself and others blocked, simply because we told the truth.
Misinformation can come from everywhere, even from people who seem to be on the “same side” as us. Please don’t take everything you read at face value, and actually check things before spreading them. I’ve seen many “verified” accounts and even some articles on reputable outlets about this 5 million/3 days thing. Be smart out there.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017 · 2:10:48 AM +00:00
·
claireducky
I’ve been asked by a few Twitter followers today to do a comparison to historical growth for these accounts. Those numbers are available in graph form here: www.trackalytics.com/…
To verify the graph and get monthly totals, myself and @OnlyRealFred went back through older archives and came up with these numbers (with archives for proof).
@RealDonaldTrump Follower Counts:
May 30th: 30.9m (+2.4m)
May 1st: 28.5m (+1.3m)
April 1st: 27.2m (+1.4m) archive.is/…
March 1st: 25.8m (+2.7m) web.archive.org/…
Feb 1st: 23.1m (+4.8m) web.archive.org/…
Jan 1st: 18.3m (+1.9m) archive.is/…
Dec 1st 2016: 16.4m (+3.6m) web.archive.org/…
Nov 1st 2016: 12.8m (+0.8m) archive.is/…
Oct 1st 2016: 12m (+0.8m) archive.is/…
Sept 1st 2016: 11.2m (+0.7m) web.archive.org/…
Aug 1st, 2016: 10.5m (+1.1m) web.archive.org/…
July 1st, 2016: 9.4m (+0.8m) web.archive.org/…
June 1st, 2016: 8.6m web.archive.org/…
If you want to go back further than a year, @spdustin put together a pastebin with follower counts going back to 2014 here: pastebin.com/...
Summary: over the last year, @realDonaldTrump has gained 22.3 million followers. Despite Jester’s claims about 5million in 3 days, the amount actually gained during May 2017 doesn’t seem extremely out of place when compared to other monthly totals. It’s not even the highest monthly total in recent months. In January, Trump gained 4.8million followers, presumably because of his inauguration. He gained another 2.7million in February.
The bump during May 2017 when compared to March/April could be because of heightened bot activity, or just because more people are following him to see his latest crazy Tweets now that the Trump-Russia investigation is heating up. I’m one of those followers, myself.
Here’s the numbers for the @POTUS account, some of which aren’t for the exact 1st of the month because no archives exist for that day.
May 30th: 18.1m (+ 1.2m)
May 1st: 16.9m (+0.6m)
March 27th: 16.3m (+0.6m) web.archive.org/...
March 1st: 15.7m (+1m) web.archive.org/...
Feb 1st: 14.7m (+1.8m) web.archive.org/...
Jan 1st: 12.9m (+0.6m) web.archive.org/...
Dec 1st 2016: 12.3m (+1.2m) web.archive.org/...
Nov 1st 2016: 11.1m (+0.6m) archive.is/...
Oct 1st 2016: 10.5m (+0.4m) web.archive.org/...
Sep 1st 2016: 10.1m (+0.5m) web.archive.org/...
Aug 1st 2016: 9.6m (+0.9m) web.archive.org/...
Jul 1st 2016: 8.7m (+0.7m) web.archive.org/...
Jun 1st 2016: 8m web.archive.org/…
Summary: over the last year, @POTUS has gained 10.1 million followers. The amounts gained in March and April seem to be in line with what President Obama gained with this account prior to the election day per month. May 2017’s amount is about double the average number, but isn’t higher than the amount gained after his election or inauguration. It could be natural mix of bots/real, or it could be 99% bots. I can’t really say.
At any rate, while May 2017 seems like it was a big month for both @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS, the numbers are not BIGLY out of the normal gains over the previous year. There could be some crazy bot creation going on right now, or there might not be. We can’t really say 100% either way what the makeup of his new followers are.
But no matter how you cut it, he did NOT get 5 million followers in 3 days. That’s just plain “FAKE NEWS.”