A staggering amount of President Donald Trump’s 38.4 million Twitter followers are inactive or “egg accounts,” and the remaining few who are actual human beings post more about pop culture than they do politics, new data has found.
Social media analytics firm SocialRank recently examined what exactly Trump’s active Twitter followers—accounts that have tweeted in the past 90 days—actually post about. The answer? A whole lot of pop culture and not too much about politics.
Kharly Stauber, SocialRank’s head of content and accounts, explained to the Daily Dot how she sifted through Trump’s 38.4 million followers and found less than 30 percent of his following is real.
“That brought the following down to 11.1 million people,” she said. “Those were the people I scooped the data from.”
Trump’s history with fake Twitter followers is fairly expansive, SocialRank found earlier this year. In May, the Daily Dot first reported that at least 900,000 of the Twitter followers Trump gained during that month were fake or inactive accounts, and a few months later, it was reported that 2.4 million of the 5.5 million accounts that followed @realDonaldTrump since that time were also “egg accounts.”
Here’s a look at what SocialRank found Trump’s followers tweeted about.
Current events and politics:
- 110,000 tweeted about DACA
- 128,000 tweeted about Hurricane Irma
- 196,324 tweeted about the Charlottesville rally
- 30,429 tweeted about LGBTQ issues
- 14,087 tweeted about the opioid epidemic
Compared to pop culture:
- 17,994 tweeted about pumpkin spice lattes
- 115,000 that tweeted about Taylor Swift
- 215,000 tweeted about the Kardashians
- 230,255 tweeted about Beyonce
- 347,907 tweeted about the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight
Insight into what Trumps real followers post about can be indicative of the kind of president he is, Alex Taub, a co-founder of SocialRank, told the Daily Dot in a phone interview.
“I think that, if you think about it a lot of people have made the argument that [Trump] is the first reality TV star president, and this … is data that backs that a little bit,” Taub said. “If you want to attract these kinds of people, they care more about the spectacle more than they do about the actual politics of it. The other side is, yeah it’s more of a show in the theater, this is the season of the U.S., and Trump is the main character of the show. I think that’s what the data shows a little bit.”
Twitter can be a chaotic and oftentimes scatter-brained place, not to mention Trump shows up on nearly everyone’s “who to follow” list, so before making any sweeping conclusions, the social media firm examined the active Twitter followers of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Comparatively, their followers tweeted about politics at a much higher rate.
Of Booker’s 3.4 million followers:
- 56,019 tweeted about DACA
- 71,249 tweeted about Charlottesville
- 7,800 tweeted about the Kardashians.
Similarly, of Pelosi’s 1.2 million followers, 39,432 tweeted about Irma compared to 7,970 who tweeted about Taylor Swift.
“There is not one data point that correlated with the Trump data, it was always the inverse,” Taub said.
One thing Trump followers did agree on was posting about the United States: 836,153 thought “USA” was something worth tweeting.
You can read all of SocialRank’s findings here.
