‘Burning the evidence before the new boss starts?’: Don Jnr and right wingers see giant leaps in their Twitter followers after Musk bid was accepted – as Obama and left wingers lose huge numbers amid speculation algorithm has been changed
Prominent right-wing tweeters have seen their follower counts shoot up since Elon Musk took over, sparking claims their accounts had been suppressed by woke Twitter staffers.
Meanwhile, leading left-wing figures including Barack Obama as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have seen huge slumps since news of Musk’s purchase.
Donald Trump Jr, who has 7.7 million followers, saw his followers surge by 87,296 on Tuesday and suggested the increase was due to an algorithm tweak targeting prominent conservative voices ahead of Musk’s arrival.
He tweeted: ‘While I’m awesome and totally deserving of 87,000 new followers a day it seems that someone took the shackles off my account. Wonder if they’re burning the evidence before new management comes in.’
Don Jr’s account had grown by between 5,000 and 10,000 tweets a day in recent weeks, with the spike in the wake of Musk’s announcement immediately obvious.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also saw a huge 141,566 people on Tuesday, according to SocialBlade statistics. That is a vast increase on the 5,000-or-so followers the popular GOP governor generally gains in the average day.
He praised Musk’s bid for Twitter, calling it ‘a good deal for shareholders’ and saying it ‘raises the prospect that the platform will be a place where free speech can thrive, not a tool for narrative enforcement.’
Conservative talk show host Dana Loesch, who’s long complained of account suppression, saw her followers surge by about 9,000 on Tuesday.
By comparison, she was gaining a few hundred new followers a day prior to Musk’s acquisition.
Florida Governor Matt Gaetz enjoyed a 21,430 follower boost on Tuesday – multiple times higher than the approximately 500 new followers he gains every day.
Conversely, liberal politicos saw their follower numbers slump in the wake of the Musk announcement.
New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who has 12.9 million followers – saw 20,725 people stop following her Tuesday.
Prior to Musk buying Twitter, she attracted around 1,000 new followers each day, and is widely-regarded as one of the most prominent progressive voices on the platform.
Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive ‘squad’ member – Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota – saw her followers slump by 10,097 Tuesday.
That is in contrast to the hundreds or even thousands of new followers she previously gained on any given day.
And former President Barack Obama – who tops the Twitter global leaderboard with 131.7 million followers, ended up with 5,063 fewer followers than before Musk’s announcement.
While that figure is a drop in the ocean compared to his vast Twitter audience, it sits markedly differently to the 15,000-20,000 new followers Obama previously attracted on any given day.
A Twitter spokesman claimed the fluctuations were organic. Many liberals have vowed to quit the platform over Musk’s hardline pro-free speech stance, and there’s also a chance conservatives have decided to join and follow right-wingers they admire in the wake of the announcement.
‘While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation…
