Anyone with a lot of Twitter followers knows that at least some of them aren’t really humans. Bots have long been a problem on Twitter, and that isn’t ever likely to change. According to a new study by eZanga, however, it seems that the presidential candidate’s Twitter accounts are especially susceptible to being followed by bot accounts.
Donald Trump, who regularly talks about the fact that he has about 12 million followers on Twitter, actually has something much closer to 7 or 8 million. The report indicated that 39% of his followers (translating to about 4.3 million accounts) are actually fake bots.
Hillary Clinton isn’t too much better in this area. She has about 37% bot traffic, accounting for 3.1 million accounts.
Both candidates are spending millions on digital ads, including on ads targeting their Twitter followers. This means that they are wasting a huge amount of money marketing to an audience that really isn’t there.
As far as anyone can tell so far, neither party or candidate is putting any real effort into minimizing the amount of ad fraud that they fall victim to. Instead, they seem to be more interested in just pushing out as many ads as they possibly can, and hoping that at least some of them are seen by real people and may be effective.
