While the ongoing Twitter deal between Elon Musk and the shareholders lasts many things are revealing to the public regarding the popular social media.
Firstly, Elon is exposing the censorship policy that the company has, then he continues to reveal the fake and spam account numbers on the platform and now finally he reveals who and how acquires these fake accounts.
Half Of Joe Biden’s Followers On Twitter Are Fake – Elon Musk Accidentally Uncovers The Case
What is a fake/spam account one might ask? The accounts that are programmed to interact with the rest of the legitimate accounts on Twitter, but do this as a mimic of human interaction while not making sense of each interaction are called bots, or spam accounts.
Many of them are designed and used for manipulation of some cause, stock market price, sharing fake news, spreading information fast, etc. Others are registering fake accounts for a little bit different purposes. Purposes such as scamming for money, taking part in legitimate polls, populating someone’s follower count, etc.
It so happens that one of the most famous people in the world currently, the USA President Joe Biden has a great number of fake accounts following him. SparkToro is an audience research tool that shows you what websites your followers visit, social accounts they follow, hashtags they use, and more. According to them, almost half of President Biden’s followers are fake. Or to be more precise 49.3%.
How did they come up with this number you might ask. It is fairly easy. SparkToro takes into consideration the accounts that are unreachable and do not ‘see’ your tweets even though they follow you, the accounts that only post propaganda links without any other activity on their profile, and the accounts that are not active on the platform, but just exist as users.
Do not think that he is the first president who fancies these fake followers. A study was done when President Trump was is office as well. It shows that he has a massive 42.4% of fake accounts following him when he leaves office. However, at the moment we cannot check this past study. SparkToro does not keep data of suspended, or deleted accounts.
Almost 32 million people are following president Biden. With half of these being fake, he has around 16 million real followers which is a massive number by itself. However, taking into consideration that Twitter has around 70 million users in the USA only, and a massive percentage of the users that follow President Biden is in the USA, we can conclude that around 15% of the total users in the USA are following the President. This is if we do not take into account the fakes, of course.
Twitter has around 230 million users worldwide. They claim that not more than 5% of these accounts are fake. However, since Musk starts the talks about buying the company he reveals this as untrue. This number about the fakes is not basing on real research.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refuses to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.” – Elon says.
Will the company back up this 5% claim with proof? What do you think?
