Audit reveals half of Biden’s Twitter following is fake

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According to an audit tool supplied by software startup SparkToro, over half of President Joe Biden's current 22.2 million Twitter followers are bogus identities.

Based on a study of a variety of characteristics, including location difficulties, default profile photos, and new users, SparkToro's program discovered that 49.3 percent of accounts following the official @POTUS Twitter account are "fake followers."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is now attempting to acquire Twitter, has voiced worry about the number of phony accounts, and a prospective crackdown may result in users like Biden losing a large number of followers.

Musk claimed early Tuesday that his bid to buy Twitter "cannot move forward" unless CEO Parag Agrawal presents proof that less than 5% of users are bots or spam accounts.

Musk stated that 20% of Twitter accounts were "fake/spam accounts," adding that this proportion was "4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher."

"My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate," Musk wrote. "Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does."

Read next: Musk second-thoughts Twitter

 

It is unclear how Musk arrived at the 20% number. On Monday, he and Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets regarding the issue of fraudulent accounts.

"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 Tweeted.

Twitter's CEO has stated that the business estimates "every quarter" that less than 5% of monetizable daily active users (mDAU) are spam accounts.

Musk reacted to Agrawal's 13-tweet thread with a poop emoji at first, then wrote: "So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter."

There has been conjecture that Musk is utilizing the issue of phony accounts to get a better bargain for Twitter. Twitter's stock price is at $36.80 per share, which is much lower than Musk's offer of $54.20 per share.

Fake followers, according to SparkToro, 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and will not see the account's tweets (either because they're spam, bots, propaganda, etc., or because they're no longer active on Twitter."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 software company's tool also found that Biden's account has more fake followers than most.

Musk's account has over 93.3 million followers, and according to SparkToro's algorithm, 70.2 percent of those profiles are fraudulent.

Musk tweeted on Friday that the acquisition of the firm was "temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users."

Since 2019, Twitter has been providing the 5% projection, which has been cited in the company's previous 11 quarterly reports.

Musk's move to halt the transaction reduced Twitter's share price by 15% in pre-market trade on Friday.