Nearly half of the 22.3 million followers of President Joe Biden’s Twitter account are not real people, Newsweek reported Tuesday citing analysis provided by a small software company. The same measure was used by Elon Musk to suspend his acquisition of the social media giant.
SparkToro, which operates a tool to tell “fake” accounts on Twitter from authentic accounts, looked at the official @POTUS account and found that 49.3% of them were inauthentic. The screening process considers several factors, from activity data to profile photos, to determine if there’s a real person behind each account. The share of bots following Biden is higher than most, the company said.
Billionaire Elon Musk last week suspended his acquisition of the platform for $44 billion, saying the company was wrong when it said less than 5% of Twitter accounts were “spam/fake”. He claimed the actual percentage was closer to 20 and said the buyout price he was offering shareholders was based on the company’s estimate, so an adjustment was needed.
He and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets about the issue, with the executive touting Twitter’s effectiveness in removing inauthentic accounts from the platform. Twitter suspends 500,000 fake accounts a day “usually before you even see them” and locks millions every week because they are suspected of sending spam, he said.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts every week that we suspect are spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc.).
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
The analytics firm said Musk appeared to be correct in his assessment, based on what they found by checking a sample of some 44,000 active public Twitter accounts. They classified almost a fifth of them as fake.
The metric can vary significantly depending on whether inactive users are excluded from the sample. SparkToro also turned its attention to Musk’s followers and found that 23.42% of active accounts and 70.23% of all accounts that subscribed to his posts were bots. Newsweek did not say whether the sample of Biden subscribers analyzed by the company was screened for activity.
Friday, @Elon Musk said its deal to acquire Twitter was on hold pending an analysis of “spam/fake” accounts. We have now completed an analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts that tweeted in the last 90 days. 19.42% are probably spam or fake. Details: https://t.co/5CfKab0FAY
—Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 15, 2022
In 2018, the company conducted a similar study on then-President Donald Trump’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump. Of the 54 million followers he had at the time, 61% seemed fake, SparkToro wrote. Trump has since been de-platformed by Twitter.
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