Elon Musk, who reached a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter at the end of April, shared a surprise news recently. Sharing from his Twitter account, Musk showed that he did not trust Twitter’s statement that less than 5% of fake/spam/bot accounts were created.
Musk announced that the purchase is on hold until Twitter provides details supporting its calculation about bot/spam accounts. Afterwards, he shared with his team that he would determine the rate of bot accounts on Twitter and invited everyone to this process. Following the invitation of Elon Musk, a report was shared today that achieved great results in this regard.
64 million of Elon Musk’s 92 million followers could be fake
- Followerwonk dataset from left to right, SparkToro fake account tool, Twitter’s follower The number of followers (active), the number of followers of Elon Musk (active) and the number of both active and inactive followers of Elon Musk.
A joint study by SparkToro and Followerwonk took 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90 days and revealed the ratio between bot accounts and real accounts. 19.42% of the automatically and randomly selected accounts by the computer were fake/bot accounts.
SparkToro’s randomly selected data set of 44 thousand 58 accounts, as well as Twitter and Elon Musk’s followers were also examined. As a result of the study, it was revealed that while 16 of every 100 followers of Twitter are fake, 23.42% of the 26.8 million accounts that follow Elon Musk’s account may be fake. While these numbers only consisted of accounts that were active in the last 90 days, it was revealed that 70.23% of Elon Musk’s followers could be fake when this limit was removed.
Twitter, in its report for the last quarter of 2021, announced that the total number of bots/fake accounts on Twitter constitutes 5% of total Twitter users.
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