New audit reveals around half of US President Biden’s 22.2M Twitter followers are 'fake'

At least half of President Biden’s 22.3 million Twitter followers are bogus, a new audit has reportedly revealed. Conducted by software firm SparkToro, the audit found that nearly 49.3% of the incumbent president’s followers were “fake”. It describes these “fake followers’ as those accounts which were “unreachable and will not see Bidens’ tweets”. Notably, the fake followers list also included those accounts which were no longer active on the microblogging platform.

This comes as tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is currently attempting to buy Twitter, said that he would launch a crackdown on sham accounts. However, CEO Parag Agrawal fired back at Musk 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. Interestingly, the same tool used by SparkToro, showed that approximately 53.3% of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's followers on the social media platform were fake. 

At present, Biden's Twitter account has a total following of 22.3 million while Vice President Kamala Harris' account is followed by 12.8 million. US First Lady Jill Biden has over 3.8 million followers and the White House's official page has 7 million followers. Other high ranking officials also have a considerable following. State Secretary Antony Blinken has 1.4 million followers while Defence Chief Lloyd Austin has around 501,400 followers.

Twitter deal stalled 

Meanwhile, the deal for one of the most popular social media networks has been blanketed by scepticism. Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday warned that his planned $44 billion deal to buy the microblogging platform “cannot move forward until” the company's chief executive Parag Agrawal publicly produces proof that the website has less than 5% spam accounts. Last Friday, the billionaire had revealed that the Twitter takeover was "on hold" over the same issue. 

Musk also noted that his offer to buy the social media giant was based on the filings by Twitter to the United States markets regulator. Twitter has estimated that the number of spam or fake accounts on the platform represents less than 5% of the total users and has previously confessed its struggle to eliminate such profiles completely. 

(Image: AP)