Around 48% of Musk’s 87.9 million Twitter followers are fake, according to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, Times reports.
Spambots are Twitter’s “single most bothersome problem,” Musk tweeted last month when he completed the $44 billion buyout of Twitter.
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by adding new features, opening up the algorithms to boost trust, beating spambots, and authenticating all people,” he said.
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“Twitter is a fantastic opportunity. I’m looking forward to collaborating with the company and the user community to unlock it “Musk, who is in the process of hiring a new Twitter CEO, stated.
Not just Musk, but Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and former US President Barack Obama also have phony follower rates of 46% and 44%, respectively, for their 58.4 million and 131.7 million followers, respectively.
Fake accounts are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets due to spam, bots, propaganda, or because the account has ceased to be active on Twitter.”
According to SparkToro, Musk has roughly 7% more phony followers than the median 41% of accounts with a similar following number.
The auditing tool discovered that “accounts with an unusually low number of lists, accounts with no URL or a non-resolving URL in their profile, and accounts with an unusually low number of followers were among the most frequently observed characteristics of a sample of 2,000 randomly selected accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk.”
Musk stated last month in a TED interview that crypto-based spambots “significantly degrade the product.”
Musk has stated that he intends to address the issue by verifying “all genuine persons” on the platform.
