 | |
|
On January 6, 2021, the US Congress certified Joe Biden as the 46th US President. On January 8, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account, fallout from his tweets regarding the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In the aftermath of the events since Election Day up until the permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump, we compared the follower growth of the personal Twitter accounts of the 45th US President Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) and the 46th US President Joe Biden (@joebiden) between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12. We have also provided the historical Twitter follower count information for @joebiden and @realDonaldTrump used for this analysis.
Although @joebiden gained approximately nine times the Twitter followers as @realDonaldTrump between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12, @realDonaldTrump had approximately 3.7 times the Twitter followers of @joebiden.
In our previous posts "Revisiting Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates" and "Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates", we analyzed Twitter follower growth for all of the 26 Democratic Presidential Candidates between 2019-01-01 and 2020-04-18 using their Twitter follower count as a proxy for their popularity. We found @joebiden had 3,464,088 Twitter followers on the campaign announcement day (2019-04-25) and 4,746,628 Twitter followers after the Wisconsin Primary (2020-04-07). We have explained our methodology for studying the follower growth and released the Historical Twitter Follower Count via Web Archives code.
Finally, we created an interactive D3 Twitter follower graph for all 27 Democratic candidates, which can be used to analyze the historical Twitter follower counts and the impact of real-world events like debates, primaries, caucuses, and campaign announcement and withdrawal onto the follower count of each candidate.
Historical Follower Count
We used the GitHub repository, Twitter Follower Count via Web Archives to create our Twitter follower graphs.
Twitter Follower Count via Web Archives is a Python module that collects Twitter follower count from the web archives using MemGator for a given Twitter handle. The module parses the follower count by identifying various CSS Selectors that match the follower count element on the historical Twitter pages for almost every major overhaul their page layout has gone through.
Timeline of events in the analysis range
2020-11-03: Election Day (Analysis Begins)
2020-01-06: Capitol Riots
2020-01-08: Twitter permanently suspends @realDonaldTrump
2020-01-12: Analysis Ends
Comparing Twitter Follower Growth for Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Figure 2 shows that the Twitter follower count for @joebiden increased from 11.88M on 2020-11-03 to 23.7M on 2021-01-12. Figure 3 shows that the number of Twitter followers for @joebiden nearly doubled, with an increase of 11.83M absolute Twitter follower growth and an increase of 99.63% in absolute percentage Twitter follower growth.
 |
| Figure 2: Twitter follower growth for @joebiden |
 |
| Figure 3: Absolute Twitter follower growth for @joebiden |
Since Twitter suspended @realDonaldTrump on 2021-01-08, we do not have mementos for the account after 2021-01-07. Figure 4 shows that the Twitter follower count for @realDonaldTrump increased from 87.38M on 2020-11-03 to 88.72M on 2021-01-07. Figure 5 shows that there is an increase of 1.34M absolute Twitter follower growth with an increase of 1.54% in absolute percentage Twitter follower growth for @realDonaldTrump.
With 87.38M Twitter followers, @realDonaldTrump had seven times the Twitter followers of @joebiden at 11.88M on 2020-11-03. With 88.72M Twitter followers, @realDonaldTrump had approximately 3.7 times the Twitter followers of @joebiden at 23.7M on 2021-01-12 .
 |
| Figure 4: Twitter follower growth for @realDonaldTrump |
 |
| Figure 5: Absolute Twitter follower growth for @realDonaldTrump |
Figure 1 shows that @realDonaldTrump had a major spike in daily Twitter follower growth rate after Election day, the daily Twitter follower growth rate for @realDonaldTrump is roughly one-third of the daily Twitter follower growth rate for @joebiden. The Capitol Hill riots saw a minor spike in daily Twitter follower growth rate for @realDonaldTrump. We found 58 days out of the 70 days of our analysis had a negative daily Twitter follower growth rate for @realDonaldTrump that translates to the decrease in the Twitter Followers.
Our analysis of Twitter accounts, @joebiden and @realDonaldTrump, between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12 shows that Joe Biden nearly doubled his Twitter followers from 11.88M to 23.7M and Donald Trump's Twitter followers increased from 87.38M on 2020-11-03 to 88.72M on 2021-01-07 with 1.54% Twitter followers growth rate. We found that Joe Biden has gained approximately nine times more Twitter followers than Donald Trump within the range of our study. We found that both accounts had a spike in their follower counts on two different occasions. The first spike was encountered between Election Day and the announcement of the Presidential Election Results by the TV networks, and the second spike was encountered around the Capitol Riots on January 6, 2021. We found 58 days out of the 70 days of our analysis had a negative daily Twitter follower growth rate for @realDonaldTrump that translates to the decrease in the Twitter Followers. We found the daily Twitter follower growth rate for @realDonaldTrump is roughly one-thirds of the the daily Twitter follower growth rate for @joebiden between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12.
@joebiden historical Twitter follower count data:
@realDonaldTrump historical Twitter follower count data:
Code for collecting historical Twitter follower count:
-----
Mohammed Nauman Siddique