https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-twitter-followers-obama-826471/
April 24, 2019 10:06AM ET
Trump’s Twitter Problem? He Has Less Followers Than Obama
The president met with CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday to discuss … why his metrics aren’t better
Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock
President Trump has just under 60 million Twitter followers. This is a lot. Barack Obama has over 106 million. This is a lot more. The discrepancy is precisely the type of thing that would infuriate the current occupant of the White House and, according to the Daily Beast, it does.
“Trump has repeatedly griped to associates about how Obama has had more Twitter followers than he has,” two people close to Trump told the outlet, “even though — by Trump’s own assessment — he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is.”
So frustrated by his lagging Twitter ratings was Trump that he brought the issue up to CEO Jack Dorsey during a quasi-secretive meeting at the White House on Tuesday. The Washington Post reported that a “significant portion” of the meeting focused on the president’s belief that Twitter has been intentionally stripping him of followers. The Daily Beast similarly reported that Trump spent an “inordinate amount of time complaining about his lost followers.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview
What Is Intermittent Fasting? Why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Has an Absolutely Bonkers Diet
Dorsey replied by emphasizing that any decrease in followers is simply the result of the company purging bots and fake accounts.
Hours before the meeting, Trump accused Twitter of discriminating against conservatives, alleging the platform is “playing political games” by making it “hard for people to sign on” and “constantly taking people off the list.”
Republicans, including the president, have long claimed, without real evidence, that social media platforms are deliberately trying to tamp down the reach of right-leaning users. Last year, several prominent conservatives claimed they were being “shadow banned” by Twitter, citing a widely criticized Vice News article. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans,” the president tweeted. “Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.” Two days later, Twitter released a post explaining the concept of shadow banning, making clear that they do not do it.
In September, Dorsey was called to testify before Congress about potential discrimination. He again stressed that the platform is not biased against Republicans. “Let me be clear about one important and foundational fact,” he said. “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”
Nevertheless, prominent conservatives have continued to cry foul. One of the “many people” filing “big complaints” Trump may have been referring to on Tuesday is his son, Donald Trump, Jr., who has on multiple occasions complained about what he believes to be anti-conservative bias among tech companies. Most of his theories are easily debunked. On Easter, he posted to Instagram about how Google did not animate its homepage for Easter. As Ashley Feinberg of HuffPost pointed out, it did.
It’s unfortunate that Trump’s meeting with Dorsey on Tuesday centered around his insecurity that Obama has over 40 million more followers than he does, as there are plenty of totally valid things the president and the CEO of Twitter could have discussed — for instance, how the platform could be used to influence the 2020 election. In fact, it’s already happening. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that an army of pro-Trump Twitter bots has been enlisted to promote the idea that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “Russiagate hoax.”
https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/23/twiter-ceo-trump-meeting/
Donald J. Trump
✔ @realDonaldTrump
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1120650189537202176
“The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump.” @MariaBartiromo So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list. Big complaints from many people. Different names-over 100 M.....
84.4K
7:26 PM - Apr 23, 2019
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https://phys.org/news/2018-10-trump-twitter-followersbut-gained.html
Trump complains about Twitter removing his followers
US President Donald Trump expressed displeasure that Twitter's efforts to weed our fake and abusive accounts have curbed growth in his number of followers
US President Donald Trump complained Friday that Twitter is removing some of his followers and has made it harder to join, an apparent critique of the social network's efforts to weed out fake and abusive accounts.
Trump, who has some 55 million Twitter followers, revived his argument about "bias" by internet firms in a morning tweet that suggested growth in his network was slowing.
"Twitter has removed many people from my account and, more importantly, they have seemingly done something that makes it much harder to join—they have stifled growth to a point where it is obvious to all," he wrote.
"A few weeks ago it was a Rocket Ship, now it is a Blimp! Total Bias?"
Trump's remarks appeared aimed at Twitter's efforts to weed out fake and "spam" accounts to improve the health and safety of the platform.
For months, Twitter has sought to eliminate automated and bogus accounts designed to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter, in response to concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Twitter said this week the number of active users fell by nine million in the past quarter as a result of these efforts.
Asked about the president's comments, a Twitter spokesman said: "Our focus is on the health of the service, and that includes work to remove fake accounts to prevent malicious behavior.
"Many prominent accounts have seen follower counts drop, but the result is higher confidence that the followers they have are real, engaged people."
According to the social media monitoring website TwitterCounter, Trump has not lost any followers in the past month but the rate of growth of followers appears to have slowed.
He went from 54.7 million followers on September 26 to some 55.3 million Friday, with little or no change over the past week.
The topic of fake followers has long been controversial on social media, and one research group said this month that more than 60 percent of Trump's followers were "bots, spam, inactive or propaganda."
The report by SparkToro said the @realdonaldtrump account "has significantly higher numbers (of fake or suspect followers) than any other American politician we could find."
SparkToro said in analyzing Trump's account, 72 percent of followers had been inactive for at least 120 days, 36 percent use Twitter's default profile image and 92 percent don't link to a website in their profile or use one with spam patterns.
Trump has previously accused internet firms of bias or suppressing conservative voices, despite little evidence to back up the claim.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...nt-followers-fake-account-purge-a8445461.html
Donald Trump Twitter account loses vast number of followers amid fake account purge
All big accounts are being hit by the change
Click to follow
The Independent Tech
Donald Trump's Twitter account has lost hundreds of thousands of followers after the company purged fake accounts.
The site is getting rid of accounts that it says are fraudulent, and all of the biggest accounts are losing vast numbers from their follower counts.
The president has lost at least 300,000 followers from his controversial Twitter account already.
Gadgets and tech news in pictures
Show all 40
Twitter is no longer counting as followers any accounts that have been locked because of suspected fraud, boss Jack Dorsey posted on Thursday. Locked accounts had already been kept out of Twitter's daily and monthly active user figures.
Read more
The accounts are locked if Twitter detects unusual behavior such as a burst of activity after months of dormancy.
The new policy could be substantial for some Twitter users because follower totals serve as a top selling point when celebrities and so-called social media influencers negotiate deals with advertisers. For other users, follower counts are a point of pride.
The purge is affecting all large accounts, and it is not yet clear whether Mr Trump is being hit in any different way to the average. Katy Perry, whose Twitter account has the most followers of all, lost more than 2.8 million followers on Thursday, a 2.6 percent fall from the day earlier.
As the change went into effect, Twitter's "@Twitter" account lost 12.4 percent of its followers compared with Wednesday, the steepest drop among the top 100 accounts by followers, according to Keyhole data.
Tech executive Elon Musk saw the smallest dip, 0.3 percent, or about 71,000 followers. The median decline in the top 100 was about 734,000 followers, according to the data. Twitter said its service-wide average drop was expected to be four followers.
Twitter declined to provide additional data. Keyhole specializes in capturing data from Twitter and Instagram and selling reports to businesses.
Financial analysts have applauded Twitter's efforts to better limit misuse, saying that it could pay off with greater usage long term.
Additional reporting by agencies
More about Donald Trump Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...twitters-purge-locked-accounts/?noredirect=on
Here’s how many followers Trump, Obama and others lost in Twitter’s purge of locked accounts
By Miranda Moore
July 13, 2018
Several of the most popular Twitter accounts, including Barack Obama and Katy Perry, lost millions of followers starting Thursday as the company began culling suspicious accounts, the latest effort to clean up the social media platform.
Twitter said on Wednesday it would begin deleting locked accounts this week, which it predicted would result in a “significant drop” in the number of followers for several of its biggest accounts. Twitter said the purge would take a week.
Obama lost more than 2 million followers by Friday morning, a little more than 2 percent of the 104 million followers he had at the start of the week. He is the third-most followed person on the platform, according to analytics company Twitter Counter. President Trump’s personal account shed more than 200,000 of its 53 million followers.
Singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber each lost nearly 3 million followers. They are the two most popular Twitter accounts, with 110 million and 107 million followers respectively before the purge.
Television stars Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and Kim Kardashian West each lost more than a million followers. Global soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo lost 900,000 followers since July 4, wiping out the bump of a half million followers he gained during the World Cup.
Most of these accounts, however, saw their follower counts start to slowly tick upward by Friday morning, on track with a rate of follower growth that is not unusual for the respective accounts. Obama, for example, gained nearly 2,000 followers in the overnight hours, which roughly fits the range of followers he gained in previous weeks during the same Thursday-to-Friday overnight interval. Trump, on the otherhand, gained more than 14,000 followers overnight following the deletion of accounts, nearly double the rate he gained followers in a similar time interval in previous weeks.
Twitter, which has struggled to combat the prevalence of trolls, spam bots and disinformation, had been suspending accounts at the rate of over one million per day in recent months. The increased rate of suspensions throws into question Twitter’s estimate that spam or troll accounts make up only a small fraction of its users.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Legal, Policy, Trust and Safety Lead, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that “the most significant changes are happening in the next few days, (and) follower counts may continue to change more regularly as part of our ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts.”
The company said the locked accounts slated for deletion are not necessarily the same as spam accounts or bots, but are most often accounts that were created by real people which Twitter locked following suspicious changes in behavior. The locked accounts were dormant for at least a month awaiting a password change by the owner, so it should not affect daily or monthly user metrics, the company wrote.
Twitter’s advertising-centric business model depends on metrics that show user activity, and the deletion of so many accounts can negatively affect those numbers. Twitter’s stock plunged nearly 10 percent after The Washington Post reported Twitter had been locking accounts, and has been slowly rebounding since.
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April 24, 2019 10:06AM ET
Trump’s Twitter Problem? He Has Less Followers Than Obama
The president met with CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday to discuss … why his metrics aren’t better
Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock
President Trump has just under 60 million Twitter followers. This is a lot. Barack Obama has over 106 million. This is a lot more. The discrepancy is precisely the type of thing that would infuriate the current occupant of the White House and, according to the Daily Beast, it does.
“Trump has repeatedly griped to associates about how Obama has had more Twitter followers than he has,” two people close to Trump told the outlet, “even though — by Trump’s own assessment — he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is.”
So frustrated by his lagging Twitter ratings was Trump that he brought the issue up to CEO Jack Dorsey during a quasi-secretive meeting at the White House on Tuesday. The Washington Post reported that a “significant portion” of the meeting focused on the president’s belief that Twitter has been intentionally stripping him of followers. The Daily Beast similarly reported that Trump spent an “inordinate amount of time complaining about his lost followers.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: The Rolling Stone Interview
What Is Intermittent Fasting? Why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Has an Absolutely Bonkers Diet
Dorsey replied by emphasizing that any decrease in followers is simply the result of the company purging bots and fake accounts.
Hours before the meeting, Trump accused Twitter of discriminating against conservatives, alleging the platform is “playing political games” by making it “hard for people to sign on” and “constantly taking people off the list.”
“The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump.” @MariaBartiromo So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list. Big complaints from many people. Different names-over 100 M…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2019
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2019
…..But should be much higher than that if Twitter wasn’t playing their political games. No wonder Congress wants to get involved – and they should. Must be more, and fairer, companies to get out the WORD!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2019
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2019
Republicans, including the president, have long claimed, without real evidence, that social media platforms are deliberately trying to tamp down the reach of right-leaning users. Last year, several prominent conservatives claimed they were being “shadow banned” by Twitter, citing a widely criticized Vice News article. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans,” the president tweeted. “Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.” Two days later, Twitter released a post explaining the concept of shadow banning, making clear that they do not do it.
In September, Dorsey was called to testify before Congress about potential discrimination. He again stressed that the platform is not biased against Republicans. “Let me be clear about one important and foundational fact,” he said. “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”
Nevertheless, prominent conservatives have continued to cry foul. One of the “many people” filing “big complaints” Trump may have been referring to on Tuesday is his son, Donald Trump, Jr., who has on multiple occasions complained about what he believes to be anti-conservative bias among tech companies. Most of his theories are easily debunked. On Easter, he posted to Instagram about how Google did not animate its homepage for Easter. As Ashley Feinberg of HuffPost pointed out, it did.
It’s unfortunate that Trump’s meeting with Dorsey on Tuesday centered around his insecurity that Obama has over 40 million more followers than he does, as there are plenty of totally valid things the president and the CEO of Twitter could have discussed — for instance, how the platform could be used to influence the 2020 election. In fact, it’s already happening. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that an army of pro-Trump Twitter bots has been enlisted to promote the idea that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “Russiagate hoax.”
https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/23/twiter-ceo-trump-meeting/
Donald J. Trump
✔ @realDonaldTrump
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1120650189537202176
“The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump.” @MariaBartiromo So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list. Big complaints from many people. Different names-over 100 M.....
84.4K
7:26 PM - Apr 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
34.2K people are talking about this
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-trump-twitter-followersbut-gained.html
Trump complains about Twitter removing his followers
US President Donald Trump expressed displeasure that Twitter's efforts to weed our fake and abusive accounts have curbed growth in his number of followers
US President Donald Trump complained Friday that Twitter is removing some of his followers and has made it harder to join, an apparent critique of the social network's efforts to weed out fake and abusive accounts.
Trump, who has some 55 million Twitter followers, revived his argument about "bias" by internet firms in a morning tweet that suggested growth in his network was slowing.
"Twitter has removed many people from my account and, more importantly, they have seemingly done something that makes it much harder to join—they have stifled growth to a point where it is obvious to all," he wrote.
"A few weeks ago it was a Rocket Ship, now it is a Blimp! Total Bias?"
Trump's remarks appeared aimed at Twitter's efforts to weed out fake and "spam" accounts to improve the health and safety of the platform.
For months, Twitter has sought to eliminate automated and bogus accounts designed to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter, in response to concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Twitter said this week the number of active users fell by nine million in the past quarter as a result of these efforts.
Asked about the president's comments, a Twitter spokesman said: "Our focus is on the health of the service, and that includes work to remove fake accounts to prevent malicious behavior.
"Many prominent accounts have seen follower counts drop, but the result is higher confidence that the followers they have are real, engaged people."
According to the social media monitoring website TwitterCounter, Trump has not lost any followers in the past month but the rate of growth of followers appears to have slowed.
He went from 54.7 million followers on September 26 to some 55.3 million Friday, with little or no change over the past week.
The topic of fake followers has long been controversial on social media, and one research group said this month that more than 60 percent of Trump's followers were "bots, spam, inactive or propaganda."
The report by SparkToro said the @realdonaldtrump account "has significantly higher numbers (of fake or suspect followers) than any other American politician we could find."
SparkToro said in analyzing Trump's account, 72 percent of followers had been inactive for at least 120 days, 36 percent use Twitter's default profile image and 92 percent don't link to a website in their profile or use one with spam patterns.
Trump has previously accused internet firms of bias or suppressing conservative voices, despite little evidence to back up the claim.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...nt-followers-fake-account-purge-a8445461.html
Donald Trump Twitter account loses vast number of followers amid fake account purge
All big accounts are being hit by the change
- Andrew Griffin
- Friday 13 July 2018 08:54
Click to follow
The Independent Tech
Donald Trump's Twitter account has lost hundreds of thousands of followers after the company purged fake accounts.
The site is getting rid of accounts that it says are fraudulent, and all of the biggest accounts are losing vast numbers from their follower counts.
The president has lost at least 300,000 followers from his controversial Twitter account already.
Gadgets and tech news in pictures
Show all 40
Twitter is no longer counting as followers any accounts that have been locked because of suspected fraud, boss Jack Dorsey posted on Thursday. Locked accounts had already been kept out of Twitter's daily and monthly active user figures.
Read more
The accounts are locked if Twitter detects unusual behavior such as a burst of activity after months of dormancy.
The new policy could be substantial for some Twitter users because follower totals serve as a top selling point when celebrities and so-called social media influencers negotiate deals with advertisers. For other users, follower counts are a point of pride.
The purge is affecting all large accounts, and it is not yet clear whether Mr Trump is being hit in any different way to the average. Katy Perry, whose Twitter account has the most followers of all, lost more than 2.8 million followers on Thursday, a 2.6 percent fall from the day earlier.
As the change went into effect, Twitter's "@Twitter" account lost 12.4 percent of its followers compared with Wednesday, the steepest drop among the top 100 accounts by followers, according to Keyhole data.
Tech executive Elon Musk saw the smallest dip, 0.3 percent, or about 71,000 followers. The median decline in the top 100 was about 734,000 followers, according to the data. Twitter said its service-wide average drop was expected to be four followers.
Twitter declined to provide additional data. Keyhole specializes in capturing data from Twitter and Instagram and selling reports to businesses.
Financial analysts have applauded Twitter's efforts to better limit misuse, saying that it could pay off with greater usage long term.
Additional reporting by agencies
More about Donald Trump Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...twitters-purge-locked-accounts/?noredirect=on
Here’s how many followers Trump, Obama and others lost in Twitter’s purge of locked accounts
By Miranda Moore
July 13, 2018
Several of the most popular Twitter accounts, including Barack Obama and Katy Perry, lost millions of followers starting Thursday as the company began culling suspicious accounts, the latest effort to clean up the social media platform.
Twitter said on Wednesday it would begin deleting locked accounts this week, which it predicted would result in a “significant drop” in the number of followers for several of its biggest accounts. Twitter said the purge would take a week.
Obama lost more than 2 million followers by Friday morning, a little more than 2 percent of the 104 million followers he had at the start of the week. He is the third-most followed person on the platform, according to analytics company Twitter Counter. President Trump’s personal account shed more than 200,000 of its 53 million followers.
Singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber each lost nearly 3 million followers. They are the two most popular Twitter accounts, with 110 million and 107 million followers respectively before the purge.
Television stars Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and Kim Kardashian West each lost more than a million followers. Global soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo lost 900,000 followers since July 4, wiping out the bump of a half million followers he gained during the World Cup.
Most of these accounts, however, saw their follower counts start to slowly tick upward by Friday morning, on track with a rate of follower growth that is not unusual for the respective accounts. Obama, for example, gained nearly 2,000 followers in the overnight hours, which roughly fits the range of followers he gained in previous weeks during the same Thursday-to-Friday overnight interval. Trump, on the otherhand, gained more than 14,000 followers overnight following the deletion of accounts, nearly double the rate he gained followers in a similar time interval in previous weeks.
Twitter, which has struggled to combat the prevalence of trolls, spam bots and disinformation, had been suspending accounts at the rate of over one million per day in recent months. The increased rate of suspensions throws into question Twitter’s estimate that spam or troll accounts make up only a small fraction of its users.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Legal, Policy, Trust and Safety Lead, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that “the most significant changes are happening in the next few days, (and) follower counts may continue to change more regularly as part of our ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts.”
The company said the locked accounts slated for deletion are not necessarily the same as spam accounts or bots, but are most often accounts that were created by real people which Twitter locked following suspicious changes in behavior. The locked accounts were dormant for at least a month awaiting a password change by the owner, so it should not affect daily or monthly user metrics, the company wrote.
Twitter’s advertising-centric business model depends on metrics that show user activity, and the deletion of so many accounts can negatively affect those numbers. Twitter’s stock plunged nearly 10 percent after The Washington Post reported Twitter had been locking accounts, and has been slowly rebounding since.
Comments
