Sanders speaks at a rally in Hollywood on Wednesday. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)



Despite having about 3.7 million fewer Twitter followers than Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had the most retweeted tweets among any of the Democratic candidates during this week’s presidential debate.





Best line of the night: “The American people are sick of hearing about your damn emails, @HillaryClinton.” #DebateWithBernie — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 14, 2015





A great line, to be sure — it was the most tweeted-about moment from the first Democratic debate of the 2016 race, according to Twitter data, and helped Sanders edge Clinton in terms of Twitter mentions, capturing 41 percent of the “debate conversation” to Clinton’s 39 percent.

But there is, perhaps, another for Sanders’ popularity on Twitter: He has the least bots and “troll Twitter followers” among any major candidate running for the White House.

According to Vocativ, which used a Twitter audit tool to analyze the verified accounts of the 12 most-followed 2016 hopefuls, 89 percent of Sanders’ 750,000 followers are actual users, while just 59 percent of Clinton’s 4.49 million are authentic. Second to the secretary of state in terms of Twitter bots and trolls? That would be Donald Trump: Just 61 percent of the Republican frontunner’s 4.59 million Twitter followers are actual users, Vocativ said.

In June, the same audit showed Trump’s share of authentic followers (90 percent) was identical to that of Sanders.

>> Related: What candidates’ Twitter lists reveal

What changed?

“While it’s certainly possible Trump could’ve purchased followers in the last few months,“ Vocativ explains, “it’s more likely that he picked up thousands of followers from bots and spam profiles that latched on to his account after an enormous surge in chatter around his name this past summer.”

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The audit is also not entirely foolproof. TwitterAudit, the tool Vocativ used for its analysis below, “takes a random sample of 5,000 followers and judges each account’s authenticity based on its number of tweets, the date of its last tweet and the ratio of its followers to friends. The fake Twitter accounts could be spam bots run by automated software or profiles that have been lying around for years. Determining fake followers is not an exact science.“

On that last point, most political campaigns would agree.