Political influence used to be measured by ratings and circulation. Today it’s measured by follower counts and views, numbers that are easy to fake and live in the black box of a social media algorithm. Fifty dollars buys thousands of followers. Bot networks inflate accounts on every side of politics. Dead accounts pile up for years and nobody subtracts them. The numbers everyone quotes never get checked.
The platforms know who’s real. They can see which accounts are bots, which followers actually watch, which engagement is bought. They don’t share it. What they show the public is the raw count and an algorithmic feed that decides, invisibly, who gets heard.
These numbers carry weight. Politicians and influencers use them to justify their policy preferences and decisions. Bookers put people on TV because of follower counts. Journalists quote “influencers with millions of followers.” Campaigns spend money based on reach nobody has audited. If the number is inflatable, the influence is too.
So we built a score that asks a harder question: how many real people does this creator actually reach? We start with the public numbers, then check them — we sample real accounts from each creator’s audience every month and look at them one by one, we measure whether the audience actually shows up in the comments and the view counts, and we discount what doesn’t hold up. The math is published, in full, in plain English: how this score is calculated.
Two things this chart is not. It’s not an endorsement machine: a high score isn’t praise and a low one isn’t criticism. We measure audiences, not opinions, and the same rules apply to every creator, left, center, and right. And it’s not a black box. Every number on this site can be explained, and when a creator’s score is discounted, the evidence is real accounts we actually looked at.
The chart gets sharper every month as more of each audience is sampled. If you think we’ve gotten someone wrong, tell us. Checking is the whole point.