E-Paper
Donald Trump claims he leads on social media, ahead of PM Modi, but numbers don’t add up
On Friday, just days before his upcoming visit to India, President Trump claimed he was No 1 on Facebook and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was No 2, and for citation, he used a purportedly direct quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
Numbers matter to President Donald Trump: the size of the crowd at his rallies, opponent’s height and weight, the size of the bank balance; and, of course, social media reach.
On Friday, just days before his upcoming visit to India, President Trump claimed he was No 1 on Facebook and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was No 2, and for citation, he used a purportedly direct quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
Hindustan Times could not find the quote on the internet, and it may have been an observation made privately. But the numbers of “likes” and “followers” on their respective Facebook pages — created, coincidentally just a month apart in 2009 and much before they were elected to their present positions — tell a vastly different story. Modi is way ahead.
Here is the president’s tweet: “Great honor, I think? Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that “Donald J. Trump is Number 1 on Facebook. Number 2 is Prime Minister Modi of India.” Actually, I am going to India in two weeks. Looking forward to it!”
President Trump is indeed looking forward to the trip and has seemed most excited about a rally he is to address in Ahmedabad, where he expects to see “millions” of people, vastly more than, he has himself acknowledged playfully, than the 50,000s he has been notching up here at a time. As stated before, numbers matter to him.
The President and First Lady Melania Trump begin their two-day visit on February 24.
The numbers don’t bear out the President’s claims, unless he, or supposedly Zuckerberg, are looking at a different set of numbers.
Modi’s Facebook page, created in May 2009, has 44,380,858 followers and says 44,624,128 people liked the page.
Trump’s page, created in April 2009, lists 27,543,545 followers, and 25,969,909 likes. Another page, in the name of President Donald J Trump, created just days before his inauguration in January 2017, has 5,388,767 follows and 3,100,731 likes.
President Trump fares much better on Twitter though. With 72.5 million followers, he easily beats Prime Minister Modi, who crossed 50 million last September and is now at 53 million.
Their social media reach has been closely followed and commented upon. A senior White House official had spoken of it in a briefing to preview Prime Minister Modi’s June 2017 visit to the White House for his first meeting with President Trump. “They are the world’s two most followed political leaders on social media,” the official had said. Even back then, Modi was ahead of Trump on Facebook and trailed him on Twitter.
