On Friday, July 29, Donald Trump tweeted a picture that made me scratch my head. No, I’m not talking about the photo of him eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with a knife and fork. (Who does that, anyway? Their slogan is “Finger lickin’ good.”) Nor am I talking about the slew of #CrookedHillary pictures that he has shared. Rather, Donald J. Trump tweeted a picture depicting the number of followers he had on social media. “Thank you!” he noted in the image, “22.4+ million followers!”

The problem, like almost everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth, is that this number is drastically exaggerated. A large number of those followers aren’t potential voters. They are not even people. They’re bots.

Bots, or digital robots, have existed on social networks since the very dawn of social networks. And everyone has some bots among their followers. People who joined Twitter in the early years often have an outsize number of bots thanks to [the pure chaos] that ruled the platform during its early days. It’s also no secret that Trump has amassed a lot of fake followers on Twitter, which the unhinged nominee—sorry, I mean, the Republican nominee—has procured over the years. Hillary Clinton has done the same thing, though on a slightly smaller scale—as have pretty much all political candidates who use the platform. But unlike most other politicians, Trump, in his typical boastful tone, brags about them being real.

I’ve written in the past about how easy it is to buy bots online, or, if you’re really vying for some fake attention, how to build your own bot farm that you can control at will—bots that you can make retweet and like your own posts, perhaps. Over the years, the bot industry has gone from a somewhat silly subculture to a powerful force that can game the system for financial, and now political, gain. One bot owner told me that he makes tens of thousands of dollars a week by offering celebrities, politicians, and corporations access to his army of a half million bots.

Facebook and Twitter are fully aware of the problem with bots on their services, and have disclosed the issue in their own separate Securities and Exchange Commission filings. But given that there is so much money at stake for the owners of the bots, it has become all but impossible to figure out who is real, and who is fake, on the platforms. And people like Trump are able to take full advantage of that limitation.

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Back in the early days of fake followers, the programmers who made the bots often just plucked pictures of people from Google, created a fake name, fake biography, and—voilà—you had a fake follower. But now, to subvert being found out, bots have become incredibly clever, even sometimes becoming indistinguishable from real people. They use semantic analysis to understand what people are tweeting about, and reply with answers that are mostly coherent, which also more or less describes how Trump uses the service, too.