July’s Great Twitter Purge took effect last night when the social network decided to flush out hundreds of millions of fake accounts on their platform. Twitter announced earlier this week that it was going to purge fake, suspicious users, which would decrease the “follower” count of the people the dummy accounts followed. “Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop,” Twitter announced.
The platform does this routinely; as in May and June, the company suspended more than 70 million fake accounts. It’s usually celebrity accounts that see the biggest declines in followers (because they tend to have the most followers overall, and hence the fakest followers too), but former President Barack Obama took a noticeable hit too.
According to the Daily Caller: “Obama’s Twitter follower count dropped by more than 2 million. Obama had 104 million Twitter followers before Twitter’s purge, according to The Hill, and had around 101 million by Thursday evening.” In total, Obama lost roughly 2 percent of his followers, but still remains the third most followed person on the platform, behind pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber (who both lost a similar number of followers). The 100 most-followed Twitter accounts saw a median decline in followers of 734,000, according to the social analytics firm Keyhole.
President Donald Trump, who boasts a total of 53 million followers, lost about 300,000, while Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s founder) lost 200,000. Trump’s official presidential account, @POTUS, saw a drop of about 60,000 followers. As a percentage of total followers, Trump did have comparatively fewer fake followers than Obama. (RELATED: Obama Follows WHO On Twitter?).
Among other famous individuals; actor Ashton Kutcher, lost 1.1 million followers, while Oprah Winfrey and Shaquille O’Neal also lost more than a million followers each too. Admittedly, I’m not really sure what the Twitter purge solves, given that those Twitter are trying to thwart will just respond by creating more fake accounts (hence why Twitter is having these purges periodically in the first place).
It was interesting to see though, that of the two most followed politicians on Twitter (Obama and Trump), the fake and suspicious users have flocked almost exclusively to one of them. While Obama leads in follower count, Trump leads in effectiveness when it comes to using Twitter as a political weapon. Just during the campaign season alone, media coverage of Trump’s tweets garnered The Donald the equivalent of $5 billion in free advertising – more than total spending on the election. And he hasn’t logged off since.
Meanwhile, it was Obama that the media has lauded as the most tech-savvy presidency. Just take a look at a sampling of the delusional headlines:
Even the social network itself, the leadership of which leans far-left, can’t discount the fact that the Trump Presidency single-handedly saved their company from financial ruin. According to one analyst estimate, $2 billion of Twitter’s market value can be solely attributed to Donald Trump being active on the site (and the media coverage his tweets attract).
Obama may dominate in follower count, but he never did what Trump did, and use Twitter as a mechanism to bypass the media and speak directly to the American people. It serves as a reminder to just how biased the media is when the man who couldn’t even figure that out is somehow lauded as the nation’s “most tech-savvy president.”
