Posted on 06/17/2015 5:24:58 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Donald Trump has more followers on Facebook than any other candidate, but most are from developing countries.
Donald Trump is running for president and whatever you think of his chances of picking up votes, on Facebook no candidate trumps The Donald.
Yet, there’s something strange about a lot of the fans. Only 42 percent of Trump’s 1,694,561 followers on Facebook are American, while most come from developing nations like the Philippines, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Indonesia and Colombia, a Vocativ analysis shows.
(GRAPH-AT-LINK)
It’s not entirely unusual for Trump to have followers in developing countries given that he’s an internationally renowned business celebrity, he runs the Miss Universe pageant and he has properties worldwide. Yet, in some of the countries where Trump has properties—Turkey, Korea, Ireland, Dubai—he doesn’t have a large Facebook following.
What Trump does have is a large fan base in countries that researchers have deemed hubs for Facebook fraud. Specifically, they are home to “like farms”—services through which companies or individuals can buy Facebook likes using zombie accounts run by people who might be paid as little as $120 a year.
The grossly inflated ratio of Trump’s American followers to farm-country Facebook fans also suggests that a chunk of his supporters is probably fake. One in every 27 Trump followers is from the Philippines. While presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz also have followers there, only one in 519 Cruz followers and one in 573 Rubio followers are from the Southeast Asian country.
Vocativ asked Michael Fire, a researcher who studies fake social media profiles, to examine two years’ worth of Facebook like activity on Donald Trump’s page, mapped in a graph pictured below. Fire said a significant portion of Trump’s followers can be attributed to Facebook fraud. “If you look at Google trends you don’t see a sudden interest in … Donald Trump. So, the increase in likes looks strange,” Fire said. “Moreover, the pattern of the graph also looks like it tries to avoid detection by the Facebook protection systems, because it increases slowly and then seems to stop.”
An analysis of Trump’s Malaysian followers revealed that some of them like more than 7,000 pages each including pages created for brands, celebrities and TV shows. Many of the accounts have nothing in common with each other. “If they ‘like’ things that contradict each other it may be another indication that the profile is fake,” Fire said.
So, how much could Trump be paying for followers? On pages such as BoostLikes, $99 per month gets you 300-400 fans per month. Other sites charge about $15 per $1,000 likes. On the day of Trump’s most recent Facebook bump, his account gained roughly 66,000 ‘likes.’ If he paid $15 per 1,000 of them (which he probably didn’t since many have to be real followers, too), then the single boost would have cost him around $1,000—pocket change to a billionaire.
We would need to see the dates to make sense of this. The bump can easily be from a paid ad or otherwise. The two sharp dips likely came from Facebook changes. They will do a dump of dead accounts or recalculate fans counts from time to time causing a universal drop in fan count.
Please.
Stop.
You’re trying to be rational in what is clearly meant to be an emotional based thread.
Trump is taking the rubes on a tour that ends at the amazing egress.
Clearly he is pursuing Obama’s 57 State Strategy
It's going to be fun, seeing which people and groups get most irrational about Trump's candidacy.
What is today’s version of the dime needed to gain re-admission? $20?
It is a breath of fresh air to hear form a capitalist instead of a bunch of communists.
Can you people even hear yourselves talk? Bad enough that Ross Perot gave us Clinton twice and that folks are telling pollsters that they’d back a surgeon who has never even been elected to a city council, but you’re getting behind Don Trump. Is Free Republic the new InfoWarriors site and I was gone that day? Did David Icke make Jim an offer he couldn’t refuse? Does Reddit have a whole new subReddit?
Given the increasingly hard left slant of many FReepers it should be “free”.
What do you call a Capitalist who uses his crony connections and bribes of government officials for every deal...you know, the “Art of the Deal?”
My personal opinion is that Trump is nothing but a wrecking ball. He’s there to make sure some candidate like Jeb! gets the nomination.
You sidestepped my assertion that this was to be an emotion based thread, not a rational search for the truth.
What do you call a Capitalist who uses...
What a communist politician by our definition?
US citizens across the political spectrum are fed up. Donald Trump is saying a lot of things we agree with, and he's saying them in a way that the issues are grabbing attention. What is wrong with that?
you are actually taking a libtard article seriously?
haven’t you learned anything here?
Trump’s plan to punish business into compliance with his ideals is no different than what Obama and his marxists have been doing all along. Maybe FBI raids on companies to find foreign made parts are in order.
Bernie Sanders on steroids.
“What do you call a Capitalist who uses his crony connections and bribes of government officials for every deal...you know, the “Art of the Deal?””
What do they call you, jealous of a rich Capitalist?
....I think your “capitalist” falls into that category....is what I’m sayin....
....I think your “capitalist” falls into that category....is what I’m sayin....
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