Conservative accounts have seen an increase in followers, while liberal accounts have lost followers, after news broke that tech billionaire Elon Musk had purchased Twitter in a $44 billion deal, according to media reports.
According to data compiled by The Verge from social media statistics site Social Blade, influential conservative accounts saw a surge in follower counts that was roughly ten times the average daily rate for the month preceding the acquisition in the two days since the deal was finalised.
Popular liberal accounts, on the other hand, saw a drop, losing hundreds of thousands of followers on April 25 and 26 after a month of gains.
According to the Verge report, the changes appear to be an organic reaction to the news of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with users either joining or leaving the platform in anticipation of Musk’s ownership.
On April 26, prominent conservatives such as Donald Trump Jr. shared screenshots from his own social media analytics that appeared to show disproportionate follower gains.
To investigate, 100 influential Twitter accounts were examined, 50 from the political left and 50 from the political right, each with a minimum of 100,000 followers.
The number of followers for each account in the last 30 days was calculated and compared to the average percentage change values for both ideological groups.
On April 25 and 26, 48 of the 50 conservative accounts gained unusually large numbers of followers, while only two accounts lost followers. On April 26, conservative accounts gained an average of 17,229 followers.
During the same two days, all 50 of the liberal accounts lost followers. According to the report, each account lost an average of 6,062 followers on April 26.
While the exact cause of the dramatic changes in follower count remains unknown, Twitter told NBC News that the fluctuations over the same time period were “a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation.”
