if you think this is bad, just wait until the Republicans audit the entire 2020 presidential election!
According to a recent audit of Joe Biden’s Twitter account, nearly half of the cognitively deficient president’s followers come from fake accounts.
An audit of Biden’s official @POTUS Twitter account found that 49.3% of the Twitter users who follow the account are “fake followers,” Newsweek initially reported Tuesday. To conduct the audit, Newsweek used a follower audit tool, called “Fake Followers,” created by data analytics firm SparkToro.
[source: Newsweek]
According to the Fake Followers tool, which is available to use for free online, the @POTUS Twitter account has about 10.9 million “fake followers” out of 22.2 million total, which make up 49.3% of the account’s followers. That number is relatively high for an account of that size. The median percentage of “fake followers” for an account of similar size is 41%, putting the @POTUS account on the high end of the spectrum. The low end of the spectrum for an account of similar size is about 25% “fake followers.”
The tool defines “fake 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 or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).
According to the tool, 81% of the audited sample consisted of followers who had created accounts in the last 90 days; 93% had profile URLs that were not correct; 91% had a “suspiciously small number of followers”; 88% “follow an unusually small number of accounts”; 24% had a default profile picture; 45% had display names with spam-correlated signals; and 72% had spam-correlated signals in their biographies.
Biden’s personal account has a somewhat lower percentage of “fake followers,” according to the report. The audit tool found that the @JoeBiden account had 43% “fake followers,” equal to about 14.7 million followers out of about 34 million total. Biden’s account was much more toward the median percentage than @POTUS. Still, some 55% of sampled followers had not been active for more than 120 days; 60% had a “suspiciously small number of followers”; 47% followed “an unusually small number of accounts”; and 87% had suspicious profile URLs.
SparkToro also conducted a large-scale audit of Twitter. In a blog post Sunday, SparkToro reported the results of a joint audit with another firm called Followerwonk, of more than 44,000 accounts active in the last 90 days. The audit found that 19.42% of active accounts were likely to be fake. Also in its report, SparkToro estimated that 22.35% of accounts were fake, using data aggregated from the more than 500,000 accounts audited using the tool over 3.5 years. That percentage was four times more than Twitter’s Q4 2021 estimate of the percentage of spam accounts on the platform.
This strengthens Elon Musk’s point after he put a pause on a massive $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter until after the spam account epidemic is sorted out. Twitter currently estimates 5% of its users are spam or fake accounts, a far cry from SparkToro’s 22.35% estimate.
These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.
To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].
Family-Friendly Content
Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More
These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.
To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].
Family-Friendly Content
Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More
