Almost half of the 22.3 million followers that President Joe Biden’s account on Twitter are not real people, Newsweek reported on Tuesday citing analysis provided by software firm SparkToro.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk had placed his planned Twitter acquisition on hold after raising concerns on fake/spam twitter accounts.
SparkToro, which operates a tool for telling “fake” accounts on Twitter from genuine ones, looked at the official @POTUS account and found that 49.3% of them were inauthentic.
The screening process takes in several factors from activity data to profile pictures to make a judgment on whether there is a real person behind each account. The share of bots following Biden is higher than for most, the company said.
The analytics firm said Musk appears to be right in his assessment, based on what they found checking a sample of some 44,000 active public Twitter accounts. They classified almost a fifth of them as fake.
The metric may vary significantly depending on whether dormant users are excluded from the sample. SparkToro also turned its attention to Musk’s followers and concluded that 23.42% of active accounts and 70.23% of all accounts subscribed to his posts were bots. Newsweek didn’t say whether the sample of Biden’s followers analyzed by the firm was filtered for activity.
In 2018, the firm made a similar study of the personal account of then-President Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump. Of the 54 million followers he had at the time, 61% looked fake, SparkToro wrote.
-RT