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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Martin Pengelly in New York

Trump losing Twitter followers – as Biden gains them

Donald Trump returns to the White House after spending Thanksgiving weekend at Camp David.
Donald Trump returns to the White House after spending Thanksgiving weekend at Camp David. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Donald Trump has been losing Twitter followers since he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden – while the Democratic president-elect has been adding them.

According to Factbase, a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s public utterances, the president has lost 133,902 followers since 17 November while the president-elect has gained 1,156,610.

In a Sunday tweet, the CNN host and media reporter Brian Stelter said that while Twitter followers were “surely not the most important metric in the world”, it was “still worth noting: for the first time since 2015, Trump is consistently losing followers”.

Factbase, he pointed out, had “measured small declines for 11 days in a row”.

Trump has 88.8 million followers, to whom he continues to tweet baseless claims of electoral fraud and all-out conspiracy theories surrounding his loss to Biden.

His most recent message at the time of writing accompanied video of a crowd at a rally and said: “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”

Trump has complained about his treatment by Twitter, alleging it is biased against conservatives. Many observers expect that once he leaves office, the site will stop giving him the benefit of the doubt regarding his false and inflammatory messages.

Biden has 20.2 million followers.

On Monday morning, his most recent message read: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, and listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”

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