Almost half of the 22.3 million followers that President Joe Biden’s account on Twitter has are not real people, Newsweek reported on Tuesday citing analysis provided by a small software firm. Elon Musk used the same method to stop his purchase of social media giant.
SparkToro is a platform for sharing stories “fake”We screened Twitter accounts to distinguish fake ones from real ones and looked at @POTUS’ official account. 49.3% were not authentic. Each account’s profile picture and activity information are taken into consideration when deciding if they belong to a person. Biden has a higher percentage of bots than most people, according to the company.
Elon Musk, the billionaire, stopped his $44-billion purchase of the platform. He claimed that it was incorrect when it said that less than 5 percent of accounts on Twitter were in fact fake. “spam/fake”. According to him, the true percentage is closer to 20. He also claimed that the share buyout price offered to shareholders was calculated based on company estimates. So an adjustment was required.
He and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets about the issue, with the executive touting Twitter’s efficiency in removing inauthentic accounts from the platform. Twitter blocks 500,000 fake accounts daily “usually before any of you even see them”He stated that millions are being locked up each week for sending spam.
Over half a million spam accounts are suspended every day. This happens before you see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
According to the data they collected from 44,000 Twitter users, Musk seemed right. Nearly a fifth were fake, they said.
It is possible for the metric to vary drastically depending on whether users who are not active in the sample were excluded. SparkToro also turned its attention to Musk’s followers and concluded that 23.42% of active accounts and 70.23% of all accounts subscribed to his posts were bots. Newsweek didn’t say whether the sample of Biden’s followers analyzed by the firm was filtered for activity.
Freitag, @ElonMuskHis deal to buy Twitter had been put on hold while we analysed spam/fake accounts. We’ve now analyzed 44,058 public Twitter account accounts that have tweeted within the past 90 days. 19.42% are likely spam or fake.Details: https://t.co/5CfKab0FAY
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 15, 2022
A similar investigation was done by the company in 2018 on the account of former President Donald Trump. SparkToro found that 61% of the 54 million people he followed at the time looked fake. Twitter has de-platformed Trump since then.
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