re: FAKE NEWS, FAKE FOLLOWERS: TwitterAudit Reports CNN Has 17 Million Fake Twitter Followers

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Maybe because Obama was president for 8 years, and Trump has been for less than a year?

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This isn't the first time someone has pointed out that a good portion of Trump's Twitter following is fake, but what's interesting is that its fakeness seems to be increasing. In January, journalist Yashar Ali ran an audit on Trump's Twitter account and found that 68 percent of his then-20 million followers were real. Now he's at 30 million followers, but only 51 percent are real, which means of 10 million followers Trump has gained since January, about 8.3 million are fake.

In April 2016, when Trump was beginning to gain traction as a serious candidate to at least win the Republican presidential nomination, the former reality TV star had a mere 7.58 million followers, only 8 percent of which were fake, according to FiveThirtyEight. It's not surprising that as Trump's global profile has skyrocketed in the past 13 months, so too have the number of bots attached to his Twitter account—but it's astonishing how much the percentage of his followers that are fake has risen.

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