The President of the United States of America Joe Biden has close to 22.2 million followers on Twitter
The President of the United States of America Joe Biden has close to 22.2 million followers on Twitter, but according to a company called SparkToro, nearly half of these are fake. SparkToro is a software company that has an audit tool that found 49.3 percent of Biden's followers to be “fake”. This estimation is based on different factors such as location, default profile images and new users.
SparkToro defines fake followers as "accounts that are unreachable and will not see the following account's tweets (either because they're spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they're no longer active on Twitter)."
The tool can be accessed by any Twitter user for checking how many of their followers are fake. NDTV, however, can't authenticate the results shown by SparkToro.
Earlier this month the same tool was claim to show that 53.3 per cent of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's followers are fake.
Speaking about its methodology, SparkToro told The Independent, “This audit analyses a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that follow elonmusk, then looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/ bot/ low quality accounts.”
Mr Musk who is currently in the middle of trying to buy Twitter has over the last few weeks expressed concern over fake accounts. The 44 billion dollar deal is held up due to Musk claiming that the number of fake followers Twitter estimates is much smaller than it actually is. CEO Parag Agrawal has said that 5 percent of all twitter accounts seem to be fake, but Musk believes this number to be much higher, closer to 20 percent.