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White House press secretary Sean Spicer said President Trump's use of Twitter "gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people," and is an effective tool, on June 6 at the White House. (Reuters)

This article has been updated.

During the daily press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about President Trumps tweet earlier in the day claiming that the media was trying to get him to stop tweeting. (We very much are not.)

Wasnt it the case, Spicer was asked, that Trump often does himself more harm than good with his from-the-hip tweeting?

The president is the most effective messenger on his agenda, Spicer replied. I think his use of social media he now has a collective total of close to 110 million people across different platforms gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people, which has proved to be a very, very effective tool.

One can debate whether Trumps Twitter feed has been terribly effective at making him successful, post-election. But one cannot debate the assertion that Trump has 110 million people following him on social media, because he doesnt.

Trump has at least two accounts on four of the biggest social media platforms. Combined, those accounts have about 93.1 million followers. Here they are, in descending order of number of followers. (All figures are as of writing.)

Trumps got accounts on Snapchat, too: realdonaldtrump and whitehouse. Snapchat doesnt release public figures about the number of followers.

Clearly, 93.1 million is a smaller number than 110 million. So where do those other 17-odd million come from? Some come from Snapchat, but generally, its not clear. The term social media is nebulous. Does YouTube count? Trumps account there has about 109,000 followers. What about Reddit? The virulent pro-Trump community r/The_Donald claims 6 million subscribers, but thats not social media, and that figure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trumps not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.

This latter point seized the publics imagination last week as rumors that Trump was buying Twitter followers were rampant. (Trump saw an uptick in his follower count, but not by the millions, and theres no indicator that anything untoward was happening.) But those rumors centered around the idea that an army of bots that is, automated accounts driven by code, not people was being created to do something nefarious. People dutifully plugged Trumps Twitter accounts into tools that try to estimate how many fake accounts followed Trump and determined that perhaps half of his followers fit that description.

Its important here to interject with two other important points. First of all, botsplay the role in the public imagination that atomic energy played in 1950s comic books. Its this sort of vaguely understood thing thats generally assumed to be bad, and the negative effects of bots are blown way out of proportion. Bots are our modern boogeyman, and we tend to overinflatetheir existence and impact. That includes those are my followers bots? tools, which just look at how often people have tweeted and when their accounts were created and so on, and are therefore not necessarily a good guide to how many of the accounts actually arent driven by humans.

That said, there are certainly thousands or millions of followers of the @realdonaldtrump account who are actually automated accounts. There are also any number of followers that are tied to businesses or tied back to the same individual. For example, I have probably a dozen Twitter accounts tied to my name, since I make little bots like @trumphop, which automatically retweets old Trump tweets. Lots of other people have multiple accounts, too.

Which loops us back to the first point. If youre active on political Twitter, you probably follow both @realdonaldtrump and @POTUS. You may follow both Trump and the White House on Facebook. Trump fans almost certainly follow him on both Twitter and Facebook, and probably Instagram, too. Its very fair to assume that at least half of the followers on Trumps social media accounts also follow one of his other accounts which would mean that, instead of 93.1 million people following him, the number is closer to 47 million.

But lets be more generous than that and assume that not everyone follows him on at least two of those accounts. Lets assume that only a third do. That would mean that about 62.3 million people follow him on social media or about one person for every vote he got last year. And many of those people live outside the United States or are bots.

In short, Spicers count of how many people are tracking Trump on social media is clearly inflated. But then, this is the guy whose first day on the job was spent defending the claim that 1.5 million people attended Trumps inauguration.

Maybe Spicers just bad at math.

Update: And maybe Im bad at Facebook. Added the POTUS account there, after missing it first time around.

Read more from the original source:
No, Donald Trump doesn't have 110 million people following him on social media - Washington Post

President Donald Trump is by no means popularcompared with his predecessors, his approval rating has been remarkably low during his time in the White House. But there's some small solace for the president this week: His approval rating is, at least for the moment, a hair better then where President Bill Clintonstood at the same point in his first term.

Different polling outfits putTrump at varying levels of approval, but the RealClearPolitics average hadhim at 39.8 percent Tuesday, while the weighted average from FiveThirtyEight hadhim atexactly 39 percent. Not great numbers, but still better than Clinton. On Day 138 of his presidency, just 37.8 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to FiveThirtyEight.

If you compare where each president stood at this point in the Gallup tracking poll, however, the two are deadlocked. The most recent Gallup survey pegged Trump's approval at 37 percent, the exact same figure the polling company found for Clinton in early June1993. Trump's disapproval rating in the survey was far higher, however, outpacing Clinton at 57 percent to 49 percent.

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A number of factors were blamed for Clinton's low approval at the time. The economy wasn't exactly humming along. There werethe beginnings of an ethics controversy over the White House travel office. Clintonalso allowed gay people to serve in the military under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy thatangered people, both for allowing gay people to serve and for not treating gay people equally.

"I never expected that I could take on some of these interests that I've taken on without being attacked," Clinton said about the approval polls at the time."And whenever you try to change things, there are always people there ready to point out the pain of change without the promise of it, and that's just all part of it. If I worried about the poll ratings, I'd never get anything done here."

Clinton's numbers soon turned around, and by the end of June, Gallup had him in the mid-40s. By the time he left office, 66 percent of the country approved of him.

Trump, meanwhile, has seen his approval rating decline steadily since he moved into the White House. The FBI investigation into his campaign's possible ties to Russiawhich, the U.S. intelligence community says,worked to get Trump electedcertainly hasn't helped the president's popularity.

A major event involvingthat controversy is scheduled for Thursday, when former FBI Directory James Comeywhom Trump firedis expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey will almost certainly address a conversationwith Trump during which the president reportedly urged him to end theinvestigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Polls, meanwhile,have shownthat voters are concerned about the Russia investigationand how Trump has handled it. Meaning that it seems likely the president could trail Clinton again soon.

Go here to read the rest:
Donald Trump's Approval Rating Is Better Than Bill Clinton's at This Point in His First Term - Newsweek

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, was employed as a contractor with Pluribus International Corp., a government facility in Georgia from around February 13, according to an affidavit supporting her arrest. Her Twitter activity dropped significantly after that date.

The Justice Department announced charges Monday against Winner. She is accused of leaking classified information, used as the basis for an article The Intercept published Monday, detailing a classified National Security Agency memo.

She also uses her Twitter username @Reezlie on Instagram; however, her activity on the two platforms differed dramatically. On Instagram, she primarily posted selfies from the gym and pictures of food, while on Twitter she rarely posted about herself, focusing more on politics -- behavior not uncommon for people who use both social networks.

Winner follows 50 Twitter accounts, among them Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, several with links to the group Anonymous and "alt" government agency accounts that became popular after President Donald Trump's inauguration, including AltFDA. None of the accounts appear to be personal connections.

Winner didn't hide her disdain for Trump. On Election Night, when it became apparent that Trump would win, she tweeted, "Well. People suck. #ElectionNight"

On February 11, she was particularly active on the social network, tweeting directly at the President, describing him as an "orange fascist."

Melania and I are hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Mrs. Abe at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. They are a wonderful couple!

the most dangerous entry to this country was the orange fascist we let into the white house

Winner didn't appear to post explicitly about hacking or leaking but did retweet and like several tweets on the topic.

She "liked' a tweet from the hacking group Anonymous in November that hinted at hacking a Mac computer the then-President-elect was using.

Winner also favorited a February 15 tweet linking to an article about White House press secretary Sean Spicer's reported lax approach to his personal data security and also liked a WikiLeaks tweet linking to a Wall Street Journal reported headlined, "Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump on Leak Concerns."

She follows several "rogue" Twitter accounts designed to look like they are run by federal agencies. Many of these accounts claim to be run by agency employees unhappy with the Trump administration.

She retweeted a post in January from the "Rogue NASA" account that attempted to explain why such accounts were becoming more popular.

Rogue Twitter accounts are fun, but gov't employees and scientists are very afraid of being fired if they speak out & share facts. #resist

Winner's Twitter activity slowed in mid-February, and the last time she appeared to tweet before her arrest Saturday was on March 5, when she tweeted at Anonymous, "what happened to the Feb 28th call for Trump to resign?"

Her mother, Billie Winner, said her daughter wasn't especially political and had not praised past leakers such as Snowden to her. "She's never ever given me any kind of indication that she was in favor of that at all," her mother said. "I don't know how to explain it."

Her court-appointed attorney, Titus Nichols, told CNN he was unable to confirm Tuesday that the Twitter account was Winner's.

Earlier, he said he believes the government has a political agenda by going after his client, whom he says is a low-level government employee. Nichols said he hasn't seen anything that would lead him to believe Winner is guilty of these charges.

CNN has reached out to Pluribus International to ask if it was aware of Winner's Twitter account.

CNN's Nick Valencia contributed to this report.

Read more:
Accused leaker Reality Winner called Trump an 'orange fascist' on Twitter - CNN International

New York Times

London, Qatar, Donald Trump: Your Tuesday Briefing New York Times Two of the three suspects in the London attack have been identified. One, nicknamed Abs, had appeared in a TV documentary about jihadis in Britain. Click here for a short 360 video of the speech by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, at a vigil yesterday.

See more here:
London, Qatar, Donald Trump: Your Tuesday Briefing - New York Times

Farage says Stone did no such thing.

David CornJun. 6, 2017 10:32 AM

Brent N. Clarke/AP

Last week, the Guardian published a report revealing a new and odd twist in the Trump-Russia scandal: Nigel Farage, the British politician who led the Brexit movement in Great Britain, is a person of interest in the FBI investigation of interactions between Trump associates and the Russian government. The newspaper reported that Farage was under FBI scrutiny because he had relationships with both the Trump camp and WikiLeaks, which disseminated Democratic emails swiped by Russian hackers in an effort to help Donald Trumps presidential campaign. Farage dismissed the story as hysteria and said he had not been contacted by the FBI. But Farage did meet with Trump during the campaign. And a source close to the Trump camp tells Mother Jones that a Trump-Farage meeting was set up by Roger Stone, the veteran political dirty-trickster and long-time Trump adviser who has come under investigation in the Trump-Russia inquiry.

That source is Stone himself.

In the months since the election, Stone has drawn the attention of investigators and reporters because he made statements during the campaign that implied he possessed inside information about WikiLeaks plans to release material stolen in the hack-and-leak covert operation mounted by Putins regime to subvert the 2016 campaign and assist Trump. In early Augustafter WikiLeaks had disseminated Democratic Party emails hacked by Russian intelligenceStone said at a Republican event in Florida, I actually have communicated with [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but theres no telling what the October surprise may be. On October 2, he tweeted, Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks. (This was five days before WikiLeaks released the emails of Clinton campaign CEO John Podesta, which were stolen by Russian hackers.) That month, Stone claimed he had a back-channel communication with Assange through a good mutual friend. During the campaign, Stone also communicated with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that posted hacked Democratic emails, and Stone publicly insisted Guccifer 2.0 was not connected to the Russians.

Stones prescient statements about WikiLeaks anti-Clinton dumps and his claim of a connection with Assange naturally have raised questions about his role in the Trump-Russia scandal. And the Guardian report on Farage partly focused on the Brits ties to Stone. The story raised the possibility that Farage might have been Stones contact with WikiLeaks.

After the Guardian article was published, Mother Jones asked Stone if Farage was Stones mutual friend who had been his go-between with Assange. Stone replied, Dined with him once in Cleveland [during the GOP convention in July]. Got him a meeting with the candidate. Never spoke to him again.

So did Stone hook up Farage and Trump? The two politicians had a much-noticed rendezvous when Farage, then the leader of the UK Independence Party, appeared with Trump at a campaign rally in Mississippi in late August and declared, If I was an American citizen, I wouldnt vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me. It was a moment when the conservative anti-European populism of England merged with Trumps anti-establishment American Firstism. Farage spoke of pro-Brexit voters supporting the referendum to withdraw Great Britain from the European Union so they could take back control of their country, take back control of their borders, and get back their pride and self-respect. Farage urged the American people to stand up against the establishment.

A book written by a Farage associate and published in October reported that Farages partnership with Trump came about because the British politician, while attending the GOP convention, had a chance encounter at 4:30 a.m. in his hotel bar with an aide to Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. The aide suggested Farage visit Mississippi and subsequently sent him a formal invitation. A month later, Farage flew to Mississippi, just when Trump was scheduled to speak at a Republican fundraiser and a campaign rally. Farage had dinner with Bryant and regaled him and other guests with Brexit stories. Bryant suggested Farage speak at the Trump rally the following nightafter speaking at the GOP fundraiser. On a radio show the next morning, Farage announced he was in Mississippi to show his support for Trump. Steven Bannon, who had recently been named Trumps chief strategist, called Farage to check what Farage intended to say at the Republican dinner and the Trump rally. Hours later, Farage met Trump for the first time, according to this account, in a holding room at the Republican fundraiser. Trump strode across the room and gave the British politician a bear hug.

This account makes no mention of Stone. I asked Stone how his assertion that he had set up a meeting between Farage and Trump squared with this report. He replied, I suggested candidate [Trump] meet Farage immediately after the convention. Certain [Farage] asked others to secure a meeting. Dont recall when it happened only that it did. Its unclear whether the meeting Stone says he brokered was the same as the Mississippi get-together.

Stone added, You report so much bullshit why do you care about the facts?

The facts here are intriguing. If the FBI is indeed examining Farage for his ties to Assange and the Trump crew, Stones interactions with Farageand whether or not Stone really did connect him with Trumpcould be relevant. The brash and brassy Stone, who relishes publicity and mud-slinging and who has written a book claiming LBJ killed JFK, has been an enticing target for Democrats and investigators pursuing the various threads of the Russia-Trump scandal. With the Farage connection, the plot thickens.

Farage did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did the White House.

UPDATE:A spokesman for Farage says, Nigel met Roger Stone in a restaurant in Cleveland during the RNC purely by chance. They subsequently met each other in a hotel in Washington during Trumps inauguration, again without planning and by chance. He did not organise any meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Farage.

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Excerpt from:
Roger Stone: I Hooked Up Nigel Farage With Donald Trump - Mother Jones