Elon Musk's 53.3% Twitter followers 'fake' as billionaire vows to keep platform authentic

More than half of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s followers on Twitter are fake, disclosed an online audition tool which can be accessed by any user of the microblogging platform. Figures from SparkToro estimated that 53.3% of Musk’s followers are “fake” just days after the billionaire proceeded to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. The ‘fake followers’ refer to spam accounts, bots, or inactive accounts that are among the 90.3 million followers of SpaceX CEO. 

The figures surfaced at a time when the world’s richest person is currently involved in a takeover bid of the social media platform which, he has already promised to make free of spambots and scam accounts. On April 21, Musk tweeted, “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying”. Just last week, in one of the largest tech acquisitions in history, Twitter had announced that it had accepted an offer of $44 billion by Musk. The deal is expected to be completed by October. 

It is pertinent to mention here that Elon Musk’s account comes among the top 10 most followed Twitter handles. However, according to the auditing service, even for the accounts with a similar-sized following, the billionaire has a disproportionately large number of fake followers. “This audit analyses a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that follow Elon Musk, then looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/ bot/low-quality accounts,” SparkToro explained.

‘Authenticate all real humans’, said Musk

As the new owner of the social media platform, Musk has stated that he would “authenticate all real humans” as he pledged strict clampdown on inauthentic activity. Touting to make the microblogging platform, Twitter “maximum fun”, billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on April 28 proposed that Direct Messages or DMs on the platform “should have end-to-end encryption” similar to ‘Signal’. According to Musk, who recently acquired Twitter for $44 billion, the microblogging platform co-founded by Jack Dorsey, should have end-to-end encryption so “no one can spy on or hack your messages”. 

Image: AP/Pixabay