According to an audit made for Twitter by software firm SparkToro, nearly half (49.3%) of President of the United States Joe Biden’s followers were bots or fake followers. According to the firm, ‘fake followers’ are accounts that are both unreachable and unable to view the account’s tweets. This could be for a variety of reasons including that they are spam, bots, propaganda accounts, no longer active on Twitter, and so on.
Billionaire and Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk in explaining his bid to purchase Twitter stated that he was concerned about the growing number of false accounts and bots posing as people and expressed a keen interest in cracking down hard on the bogus accounts. He said 20% of all accounts on Twitter were fake and reaffirmed his plans to halt the $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform until such accounts were located and expunged.
Musk explained that his offer was made on the belief that Twitter’s SEC filing, which indicated the number of fake accounts at less than 5%, was accurate and stated that until Twitter’s current CEO produced proof as to the accuracy of the claims the deal would not be going forward.
However, in defense of the platform, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal refuted Musk’s remarks and revealed that they suspended a little over half a million fake accounts every day and lockdown millions of accounts that appear to have suspicious activity. In an interesting development, it’s been revealed by the SparkToro audit that almost 70.2% of Elon Musk’s 93.3 million followers are bots and fake accounts.
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