Why Did Trump Get So Many Twitter Bots To Follow Him This Week?

Empty Lighthouse is a reader-supported site. This article may contain affiliate links to Amazon and other sites. We earn a commission on purchases made through these links.

According to numerous reports, Donald Trump's Twitter account has grown by millions of followers in recent days. Previously, Trump's Twitter growth was relatively steady.

So it's interesting to see such dramatic growth over such a short period of time.

But what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of these new followers are apparently bots, based on their username and profile -- fake computerized followers. So what's going on?

[NOTE: This story had a major error in the number of followers that the account increased by. We have corrected the error, and apologize for it.]

Now, Trump has over 30 million followers. This growth is unlike what we have seen in the past. So we decided to do some investigation into who Trump's new followers are.

In our audit, we found that most of the new followers that Trump is received are people with no names (or dictionary word names) and a number appended.

Very few of Trump's new followers have ever tweeted, and most don't have a photo. And many of the followers aren't following anybody except Trump.

In fact, Trump currently has 14.8 million fake followers, according to Twitteraudit.com.

So what could be the reasoning for this giant surge in Twitter followers?

We know that Russia has used fake Twitter followers in the past as a way to spread disinformation. It's unclear if Trumps followers on other social platforms have also increased in this way.

There are different explanations for why this may have happened. For example, Trump's war room team may be using the additional bot followers to trick the Twitter algorithm into trending/promoting Trump's messages.

Wanna read more on this? Check these out: Oxana Fedorova/Oxana Federova: Who Is She And How Does She Relate To Donald Trump? (more); Media Says Trump Nazi Support Will Hurt Approval Among Repubs; They're Wrong (more); If Michael Dell Doesn't Leave Trump Group, Startups Need To Leave Dell (more); Watch Seth Meyers Call Out Trump For Charlottesville on 'Late Night' (more).

And here are some more related articles: Watch Republican Trump Supporter Ken Cuccinelli Tell Symone Sanders To 'Shut Up' (more); Photos: White Supremacists From Rally Meet With Republican Congressmen (more); Why Is CNN Debating Whether Nazis Killing People Is OK? Jack Kingston Says "Get Over It" (more).

A few more: The One Thing Trump and the Media Don't Get About Kim Jong Un, and Why it Should Terrify You (more); Would Trump Nuke 25 Million People To Distract His Base? It's No Longer A Crazy Question (more).