At least half of President Biden’s 22.2 million Twitter followers are bogus, a new audit revealed.
The audit, which was done for the social media giant by software firm SparkToro, found that 49.3% of the president’s followers are “fake followers,” according to Newsweek.
SparkToro has defined “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 or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently attempting to buy Twitter, has expressed concern over the growing number of fake accounts and proposed a potential crackdown on the sham accounts.
Musk said he believes that 20% of all Twitter accounts are fake and vowed to not go through with his $44M purchase of the social media giant until the issue is resolved.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Musk said.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fired back at the world’s richest man saying that the digital giant suspends over half a million spam accounts every day and locks several millions of accounts they suspect might be spam.
SparkToro used the same audit on Musk himself and found that nearly 70.2% of Musk’s 93.3 million Twitter followers were fake.