Musk currently has nearly 90 million followers on Twitter.
As Tesla CEO and soon-to-be Twitter boss Elon Musk aims to crack down on spam bots, nearly half of his own followers on the micro-blogging platform are fake.
According to Twitter, auditing tool SparkToro, of Musk’s 87.9 million followers (at the time of the research audit), roughly 48 percent are fake, reports TIME.
These are the accounts that are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter”.
Musk currently has nearly 90 million followers on Twitter.
He has nearly 7 percent more fake followers than the median 41 percent accounts with a similar-sized followings, according to SparkToro.
The auditing tool found that “accounts that are on an unusually small number of lists, accounts that have no url or a non-resolving url in their profile, and accounts that have a suspiciously small number of followers were some of the most frequently observed traits of a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk”.
Spam bots are the “single most annoying problem” on Twitter, Musk tweeted last month, as he successfully reached the $44 billion Twitter takeover deal.
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans,” he had tweeted.
