600,000 Trump Cell phones offered? There’s no proof.

The place’s the Trump cellphone? We’re going to maintain speaking about it each week. We’ve reached out, as traditional, to ask concerning the Trump cellphone’s whereabouts. As traditional, we’re nonetheless ready for a response. Within the meantime, some spectacular alleged gross sales figures have gone viral — however they may be too good to be true.

This week, I noticed one thing new in my common scouring of the net for updates on the Trump cellphone: a repeated declare that Trump Cellular has secured almost 600,000 preorders for the cellphone. With a $100 deposit per gadget, that will make for a tidy $60 million payday for Trump Cellular already.

It’s curious timing, coming simply earlier than yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a gaggle of different Democrats, calling on the company to open an investigation into the corporate’s alleged “false promoting and misleading practices.” Not everybody agrees Trump Cellular deserves the Democrats’ consideration, partly from the idea that not that many individuals are prone to have put cash down for the cellphone within the first place. As one commenter on my story yesterday prompt, “I can’t think about a whole lot of of us have been dumb sufficient to fall for this.” However based on these new figures, over half 1,000,000 folks have been.

There’s only one downside: I can’t discover a shred of proof that this determine is true. The truth is, it appears to hint again to a single viral, nameless X publish and is a microcosm of how the trendy media panorama and AI chatbots can mix to provide falsities the sheen of respectability.

I first noticed the determine in, of all locations, the Threads feed of California governor Gavin Newsom’s press workplace, which had shared a screenshot of a tweet of a Grok abstract making the declare. Reliable, proper?

The Grok publish cites “experiences from sources like Fortune, NPR, and The Guardian” for the 600,000 preorders, however a fast search of their current output reveals no signal of the quantity. I wished to know the place Grok bought it from, if not there.

A fast Google search turns up an terrible lot of social media posts, from accounts each huge and small, but additionally just a few tales in seemingly official publications. India’s Financial Instances and Hindustan Instances each reported a extra particular determine of 590,000 preorders, referencing an unspecified Related Press report because the supply.

The one current AP protection of Trump Cellular was this story from final week, summarizing the repeated delays, which makes no declare to particular preorder figures. I reached out to the group, and its VP of company communications, Lauren Easton, confirmed to me that “AP’s unique tales by no means contained such a quantity.”

The plot thickens. I attempted the authors of the 2 tales citing AP, and one bought again to me. Hindustan Instances author Shamik Banerjee referred to as the quotation “a typo,” and advised me that the determine was in reality taken from The Instances of India.

The Instances of India story, which is bylined solely to the newspaper’s way of life desk, is extra clear in its sourcing: a viral publish by a meme account.

Bricktop_NAFO, a seemingly British account with simply over 99,000 followers, principally posts pro-Ukraine content material, interspersed with unrelated memes and joke posts. It does a daily line in anti-Trump posts too, and on January eleventh, it shared the declare that “590,000 idiots bought Trumps Cell phone [sic] that went on sale.”

So far as I can inform, that is the oldest on-line point out of the 590,000 determine, although the 600,000 quantity appeared in a Fb publish again in December, albeit one with no likes, no feedback, and solely a single, personal share. Bricktop_NAFO’s publish, in contrast, has been seen 2.8 million occasions based on X and reposted one other 8,000. It’s floor zero for this explicit pressure of misinformation.

I reached out to Bricktop_NAFO, each in its DMs and in a public reply to the publish, to ask if it had a supply for the declare, however the account proprietor didn’t reply in time for publication. I additionally requested if it may level me towards the $45 Temu cellphone it claimed was a match — my colleague Allison Johnson beforehand tried, and failed, to search out an actual dupe of the T1 Cellphone, and so far as I’m conscious, nobody has efficiently matched its spec sheet and design to an present handset.

The ripple impact from this single tweet has been spectacular. X’s personal share figures above don’t embrace the numerous different posts which have picked up the made-up quantity and run with it, even taking it so far as Governor Newsom’s press workplace. It’s been lined by a number of publications, now introduced as truth on MSN.com and tech website Cellphone Area. And that protection has helped it to filter into the chatbots and never simply Grok — Gemini and ChatGPT have been each blissful to verify to me that 600,000 T1 Telephones have been ordered to this point, the previous falsely attributing the quantity to the Related Press, and the latter to Cellphone Area.

As for what number of Trump Cellphone preorders have truly been positioned? Nobody exterior the corporate is aware of, and to this point, it’s not telling. I requested the Trump Cellular press workplace for an precise preorder determine however, imagine it or not, I haven’t heard again.

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