A new audit has revealed that nearly half of President Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are fake.
The audit, conducted by software firm SparkToro, found that 49.3 percent of accounts following Biden’s official Twitter account are “fake followers,” according to Newsweek.
SparkToro defined these 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 or because they’re no longer active on Twitter)”.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has put in an offer to buy Twitter, expressed concern over the number of fake accounts and proposed a potential crackdown on them.
On Tuesday, Musk said 20% of all Twitter accounts are fake and his $44 billion deal to purchase the company could not move forward until issues with fake accounts were resolved.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” he said. “esterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does”.
“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal responded.
“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),” he added.
SparkToro also found that nearly 70.2% of Musk’s 93.3 million Twitter followers are fake.