Trump says he has over 100 million social media followers. Wrong!
President Donald Trump, as we know, enjoys inflating the size of crowds. Even digital crowds ...
The president implied he had more than 100 million social media followers in a tweet on Friday morning and, well, that's... (almost certainly) not true, unless he's counting several government accounts.
First, the tweet:
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Trump's biggest following comes from his personal Twitter account, which sits at 32.4 million followers as of this writing. Other personal social media accounts include...
...his Facebook, with its 23.6 million followers
...his Instagram, with its 7 million followers
...and his YouTube, with around 109,000 subscribers.
Add them up, and you get about 63 million followers.
But maybe you figured he's counting his @POTUS accounts, too, even though they won't be his when he's no longer president.
Alright then. @POTUS on Twitter has 18.8 million followers as of this writing, and 2.3 million followers on Facebook. The "potus" Instagram account isn't really an account, so we're not gonna bother with that one, which leaves us with around 84 million followers.
The only way he gets past 100 million with publicly available numbers is if he's including followers for White House accounts (which aren't really his followers, just like the @POTUS followers aren't really his, but we're playing the game, so). The White House Twitter account has 14.6 million followers, the Facebook version has 8.2 million followers, and the Instagram version has an additional 3.6 million.
Add those to the total, and we arrive at more than 110 million followers.
Of course, again, not really. It's pretty hard to imagine that those roughly 110 million accounts all belong to separate people, and that none of them are bots. The amount of likely overlap alone is enough to (probably) bring that number below the nine-digit threshold.
But maybe Trump's personal Snapchat account has a bajillion followers. It's possible! Snapchat doesn't release follower numbers.
So moral of the story is we live in a world where Trump's gaslighting us about his social media followers, along with everything else. Weeeeee!
Topics Donald Trump Politics
Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
