Trump’s going to need a lot more than Twitter bots

Rob Long says that gaining Twitter followers and making friends are very different enterprises

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has a mixed online following of real people and robots. Darron Cummings / AP

I have a friend who has almost 50,000 followers on Twitter and almost that many on Instagram. My friend is neither famous nor infamous and has no discernible talent. His posts on Twitter are so boring and his photographs on Instagram so lacklustre that it’s impossible to imagine they inspire anything but eye-watering yawns.

“How did you get that many followers?” I once asked him.

“I bought them,” he said, without a trace of shame.

There are services, you see, that can plump up the number of your followers – not to Kardashian levels, of course, but to the 50,000 to 100,000 range, which is pretty good if you’re a nobody. (And almost everybody, when you get right down to it, is a nobody.)

My friend insisted that he knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t under the impression that there were 50,000 actual people out there in the Twitterverse who really wanted to know what he had for breakfast. His many thousands of Instagram followers didn’t care what the sunset looked like from the window seat of his flight to San Francisco – and he knew it. In fact, he told me proudly, most of his followers on social media weren’t even real.

“To get real people to follow you,” he explained, “you have to pay a premium. I didn’t want to spend too much, which is why most of my followers are bots.”

Bots – short for “robots” – are fake people, generated by the thousands by a computer algorithm. They can be marshalled by these kinds of services to follow you on social media. The result is that you look like an important person to the much smaller number of real people who follow you, and this, apparently, has ancillary benefits.

My friend explained to me that he only has a dozen or so followers who matter. These are clients or potential clients – my friend is in the management consulting business – and they like to think that the person to whom they’re paying irrational sums of money to tell them how to fix their businesses is a sought-after and much-followed minor celebrity.

It’s roughly the same instinct that leads film studios and television networks to pitch their wares relentlessly by calling them all “smash hits” and “blockbusters” and “number one with audiences” even if the precise metrics behind those claims are murky, or in some cases totally fraudulent.

Having an audience that numbers in the tens of thousands is the new, modern way of being important. It’s a sign of high status, if you’re an otherwise nondescript or relatively unknown person, to have a following on social media, though it seems that most people are aware that the numbers are being rigged, that the followers are bots, that when we tweet our thoughts or instagram our lunch we’re only reaching a handful of (probably bored to tears) real people.

These outsize Twitter followings operate more like signals, or vestigial adornments. Men wear neckties when they want to look more formal, despite the fact that the garment itself has no useful function and merely gestures backwards in time, to an era when (the legend says) Croatian mercenaries served the king of France. The likelihood of meeting an actual Croatian mercenary in an office building or airport lounge is pretty slim, but many men still knot a necktie around their necks anyway.

I suppose that social media fame is roughly similar. It isn’t real fame – many people, like my friend, can walk unbothered and anonymously through city streets despite thousands of “followers” – but it certainly creates the illusion of popularity and maybe that’s enough.

How many times have I shrugged and turned on a television show just because I thought to myself: “Well, it’s really popular. I suppose I should see what all the commotion is about”? How many times have I dutifully marched to the cinema to see a picture that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy but felt obliged to see because “everyone else” had seen it?

The answer is: lots of times.

Right now, in the United States, the most compelling and famous political figure is a real-estate developer with orange skin and peculiar hair who brays and boasts in campaign appearances about his millions of Twitter followers, his massive popularity, and his rallies thronged with fans. Donald Trump claims to be beloved enough to become the next president. The truth, as always, is more elusive.

An analysis of Mr Trump’s Twitter following reveals thousands and thousands of bots. His television notoriety and large in-person crowds are impressive, in a way, but don’t even approach the number of votes required to become president. That number is somewhere between 62 million and 65 million. Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and Leonardo Di Caprio have bigger audiences and more popular appeal. Maybe they should run for president.

(If the three of you are reading this, please understand: I was speaking hypothetically.)

Donald J Trump would be – and should be – a darkly hilarious footnote to a presidential campaign, but he’s grasped what few others have, aside from my unfamous-but-famous friend: that the illusion of popularity can carry a person pretty far. Let’s hope, though, that there’s a limit.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl