Nearly half of Elon Musk's 90 million Twitter followers are fake, claims online tool
By Team Newsable | First Published May 2, 2022, 5:51 PM ISTAccording to the auditing tool, "accounts on an unusually small number of lists, accounts with no or a non-resolving url in their profile, and accounts with a suspiciously small number of followers were some of the most frequently observed traits of a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk."
While Tesla CEO and soon-to-be Twitter CEO Elon Musk intends to crack down on spam bots, nearly half of his own Twitter followers are false. According to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, around 48% of Musk's 87.9 million followers (at the time of the study audit) are fraudulent, writes Time.
These are the accounts that are "unreachable and will not view the account's tweets because they are spam, bots, propaganda, etc., or they are no longer active on Twitter." Musk presently has around 90 million Twitter followers.
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According to SparkToro, he has roughly 7% more phoney followers than the median 41% of accounts with comparable sized followings.
According to the auditing tool, "accounts on an unusually small number of lists, accounts with no or a non-resolving url in their profile, and accounts with a suspiciously small number of followers were some of the most frequently observed traits of a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk."
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Spam bots are the "single most aggravating thing" on Twitter, Musk said last month when he announced the $44 billion buyout of Twitter.
"I also want to make Twitter better than ever before by improving the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to promote trust, beating spam bots, and authenticating all people," he said in a tweet.
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