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Trump's 49% Twitter followers are fake

Washington - Many of them are robotic networks

US President Donald Trump has been getting close to three million followers for his personal Twitter account in less than a week, but many of them are fake, according to a report.
Many of Trump's new followers are not humans, but robotic networks. Known as bots, they are designed to look like human followers but actually are just computerised accounts, says a Tribune report.
According to twitteraudit.com, a website that analyzes Twitter accounts, out of Trump's 30.9 million followers @realdonaldtrump, 51 per cent are real and 49 per cent are fake.
Twitter Audit checks several criteria to determine whether followers are bogus, including how often they tweet and the account's ratio of followers to those who follow it. Bots post lots of tweets in bursts and usually have few followers.

However, Trump has little control over who follows his tweets. Either allies or enemies could be looking to swell followers of his Twitter account, and retweet anything he posts, the report says.
Trump's official Twitter account is @POTUS and has 18.1 million followers.
Former President Barack Obama's @barackobama account has 89.2 million followers.

According to twitteraudit, 79 per cent of Obama's followers were humans and 21 per cent appeared to be bots.
Automated Twitter bots are turning into a campaign tool to sway elections, swamping social media with fake news or messages and retweeting anything a candidate posts to suggest a landslide following. Usually, the bot accounts show no image of a person, just a shadowy outline of a human.
According to US authorities during the 2016 US presidential race, Russia used robotic-like computer commands to dramatically widen the reach of news stories - some fictional - that favoured Trump's presidential bid and adversely affected the chances of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.