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More than half of Elon Musk's Twitter followers may be fake, says online tool

Earlier this month, he said spam bots are the "single most annoying problem" on the social media platform

Published: Tue 3 May 2022, 8:05 PM

Updated: Tue 3 May 2022, 10:39 PM

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has laid out some bold, if still vague, plans for transforming Twitter into a place of "maximum fun" once he buys the social media platform and takes it private.

One of those ideas is to free the 'Twitterverse' of spam bots and "authenticate all real humans". As it turns out, the billionaire's own fan following on the microblogging site may need a good sweep.

More than half of the maverick billionaire's 90.4 million followers on Twitter are fake, according to an online auditing tool called SparkToro. The results of the audit showed that 53.3 per cent of Musk's followers are fake, which means they are either spam accounts, bots or no longer active.

Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that spam bots are the "single most annoying problem" on Twitter and claimed he wants to fix the issue.

Weeding out spam bots won’t be easy, and if he succeeds in doing so, the drastic drop in his number of followers will be the best indicator.

Spam bots that mimic real people have been a personal nuisance to Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name — often to promote cryptocurrency scams that look as if they’re coming from the Tesla CEO.

There are also plenty of spam-filled Twitter accounts at least partially run by real people that run the gamut from ones that hawk products to those promoting polarising political content to meddle in other countries’ elections.

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