Nearly half of President Joe Biden’s official Twitter account following is comprised of fake accounts according to a recent study.
The Daily Wire reports:
An audit of Biden’s official @POTUS Twitter account found that 49.3% of the Twitter users who follow the account are “fake followers,” Newsweek initially reported Tuesday. To conduct the audit, Newsweek used a follower audit tool, called “Fake Followers,” created by data analytics firm SparkToro.
According to the Fake Followers tool, which is available to use for free online, the @POTUS Twitter account has about 10.9 million “fake followers” out of 22.2 million total, which make up 49.3% of the account’s followers. That number is relatively high for an account of that size. The median percentage of “fake followers” for an account of similar size is 41%, putting the @POTUS account on the high end of the spectrum. The low end of the spectrum for an account of similar size is about 25% “fake followers.”
The tool defines “fake followers” as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).” To conduct the audit itself, the tool samples 2,000 random users picked from the 100,000 users who followed the audited account most recently. The tool then analyzes the followers, using more than 25 factors that correlate with “spam/bot/low quality accounts.” SparkToro notes that while none of these indicators alone point to a fake account, when multiple indicators are present, there is “strong correlation with low quality.”
According to the tool, 81% of the audited sample consisted of followers who had created accounts in the last 90 days; 93% had profile URLs that were not correct; 91% had a “suspiciously small number of followers”; 88% “follow an unusually small number of accounts”; 24% had a default profile picture; 45% had display names with spam-correlated signals; and 72% had spam-correlated signals in their biographies.
The discovery also comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk puts his plans to buy Twitter on hold over the amount of spam and bot accounts.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
