A tool provided by software company SparkToro revealed that 49.3% of President Joe Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are fake.
According to SparkToro, fake followers are “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 or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).”
The news could put a dent in Elon Musk’s plan to buy Twitter.
Musk demanded transparency on fake and spam accounts in order for the $44 billion deal to move forward.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal claimed only about 5% of the accounts are fake or spam. Musk estimated that the number could be around 20% or even higher, but did not explain his calculations.
Agrawal tried to explain the issue on Monday. From Newsweek:
“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even 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),” Agrawal wrote.The Twitter CEO also said the company has estimated “every quarter” that less than five percent of monetizable daily active users (mDAU) were spam accounts.Musk initially responded to Agrawal’s 13-tweet thread with a poop emoji and later wrote: “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
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