WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump's personal Twitter account is drawing hordes of new followers _ by one count, 3 million in less than a week.
Problem is, many of the followers appear to be fake.
Rather than humans, they are robotic networks _ known as bots _ designed to look like human followers but actually just computerized accounts.
A website that analyzes Twitter accounts, twitteraudit.com, says that of Trump's 30.9 million followers to his personal account, @realdonaldtrump, 51 percent are real and 49 percent are fake.
Twitter Audit checks several criteria to determine whether followers are fake, including how often they tweet and the account's ratio of followers to those who follow it. Bots post lots of tweets in bursts and usually have few followers.
Why Trump's Twitter account would suddenly surge with fake followers is anything but clear. Trump has little control over who follows his tweets. Either allies or enemies could be looking to swell followers of his Twitter account, and retweet anything he posts.
Trump also has an official Twitter account, @POTUS, which stands for president of the United States. On that account, he has 18.1 million followers.
While an avid user of Twitter, Trump has never reached the number of followers that former President Barack Obama has. Obama's @barackobama account has 89.2 million followers. Twitteraudit says that the last time his account was audited, four months and one week ago, or shortly after Trump took office, 79 percent of Obama's followers were human and 21 percent appeared to be bots.
The White House didn't immediately respond to a query about the surge in followers to Trump's Twitter account.
Automated Twitter bots are turning into a campaign tool to sway elections, swamping social media with fake news or messages and retweeting anything a candidate posts to suggest a landslide following. Usually, the bot accounts show no image of a person, just a shadowy outline of a human.
During the 2016 presidential race, U.S. authorities say, Russia used robotic-like computer commands to dramatically widen the reach of news stories _ some fictional _ that favored Trump's presidential bid and were detrimental to that of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
These strategically timed cyber offensives would send computerized armies to circulate the internet, snatching selected news items and spreading them widely via Twitter and Facebook accounts. In some cases, an Oxford University study of Michigan voters found, recipients received more messages carrying "junk" social media tweets than they did legitimate news.
Twitter users had a field day Tuesday with news of Trump's surge. Some posted images of the new followers, showing how they appeared to be fake. Others suggested that Trump's account was suddenly gaining as many as 100 followers a minute.
Trump is renowned for his Twitter blasts, sometimes tweeting multiple times an hour, aiming his attacks at "fake media" and Democratic opponents.
On Memorial Day, the president suggested in a tweet that Americans would be better off reading his tweets than getting their news from the media.
"The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don't want America to hear the real story!" Trump tweeted. That message was retweeted _ passed to other Twitter users _ nearly 28,000 times.
