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Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and soon-to-be Twitter CEO, is attempting to combat spambots, yet nearly half of his Twitter followers are false.
According to Time, around 48 percent of Musk’s 87.9 million Twitter followers (at the time of the research audit) are fraudulent, according to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro.
These are accounts that are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, or they’re no longer active on Twitter,” according to Twitter.
Musk has approximately 90 million Twitter followers at the moment.
According to SparkToro, he has roughly 7% more phony followers than the median 41% of accounts with a similar-sized following.
“Accounts on an unusually small number of lists accounts with no URL or a non-resolving URL in their profile, and accounts with a suspiciously small number of followers were among the most frequently observed traits of a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk,” according to the auditing tool.
Musk tweeted last month that spambots are the “single most aggravating problem” on Twitter, as he completed the $44 billion Twitter takeover deal.
He had tweeted, “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by adding new features, making the algorithms open-source to promote trust, fighting spambots, and authenticating all people.”
“Twitter holds a lot of promise. I’m excited to work with the company and the user community to unlock it “Musk, who plans to recruit a new Twitter CEO, said.
Last month, Musk stated that crypto-based spambots “make the product considerably worse” in a TED talk.
Musk has stated that he will tackle the problem by requiring “all real persons” on the platform to authenticate themselves.
Not only Musk but also Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and former US President Barack Obama, who have respective followings of 58.4 million and 131.7 million, have phony follower percentages of 46 percent and 44 percent.
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