Nearly two-thirds of prolific tweeter Donald Trump's 7.51 million followers on the social media platform haven't been active for at least six months, and just over a half million are fake, according to an analysis by the
Washington Free Beacon.
Only 2.2 million of his followers have legitimate active accounts, the Free Beacon reports, citing its inspection that used StatusPeople.com's Twitter analysis app, Faker. And as of April 9, according to that analysis, 525,700, or 7 percent, of Trump's followers were considered "fake."
The Free Beacon reports that GOP digital strategist Patrick Ruffini, co-founder of the firm Echelon Insights, discovered a number of Twitter accounts were tweeting the same anti-Cruz message calling for people to complain to the Federal Communications Commission about Cruz campaign robocalls, the Free Beacon reports.
He then showed that between Thursday afternoon and early Friday morning, the post was retweeted 490 times — including 274 times within an hour of the first tweet. By Friday the tweets were taken down and a number of the accounts had been suspended, Ruffini tells the Free Beacon.
"All of these people who retweeted it on their own have either been suspended or removed the tweet on their own," Ruffini tells the newspaper. "Which is very interesting that there is that level of coordination that they're going out and deleting all instances of it even when they haven't been suspended."
The account that posted the tweet, WDFx2EU, boasts 89,567 total followers; it was created Jan. 8, and the Free Beacon analysis found 61 percent of its followers are either fake or inactive; 23 percent are fake, 38 percent are inactive.
The practice is nothing new — and fake followers can easily be bought online, the Free Beacon notes.
The Daily Caller reported in September 2013 that at the time, over 20 million of President Barack Obama's followers and approximately 2 million of First Lady Michelle Obama's followers were fake.