President Joe Biden has a “fake views” problem.
A new analysis of his Twitter account finds that nearly half of his 22.2 million followers on Twitter aren’t real people.
They’re fake accounts… bots… spam… inactive users… and more, according to the report by SparkToro, a company that makes software that helps spot fake accounts on social media.
And while Biden’s account might have more fake followers than most, SparkToro says it believes nearly one in five accounts on Twitter overall are phonies.
That’s defined as accounts “that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem.”
The company also explained to The Independent how it conducts its audits. They take a random sample of 2,000 followers, then use computer analysis to check the quality of those accounts based on 25 different factors.
Those may include profile pictures, activity/inactivity, new accounts, suspiciously small numbers of followers, display names, certain info or lack of info in the profile, and more.
A single factor won’t lead to the company considering it a fake or spam account. But when they start adding up, the alarm bells start going off.
“Our Fake Followers system requires that at least a handful and sometimes as many as 10+ of the 17 spam signals be present (depending on which signals, and how predictive they are) before grading an account as ‘low quality,’ or fake,” the company explained in a blog post.
The discovery highlights an issue getting new attention this week after tech billionaire and Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk put his $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter on hold over problems with fake followers.
He challenged the company to prove that less than 5 percent of its accounts are fake, as it has repeatedly claimed.
When Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal replied with a lengthy explanation, Musk fired back an answer that didn’t include a single word.
Instead… he sent a “poop” emoji.
Fake accounts aren’t just an inconvenience for users who might get spammed by them. They can also undermine the company’s revenue as advertisers need assurance that their ads will be seen by real users, not bots and spammers.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk tweeted. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
As the Wall Street Journal notes, not all bots are necessarily fakes or spam. Some auto-post information people need, such as news headlines.
And Musk has said he’s not concerned if Twitter’s 5 percent estimate is just a little off – only that it may be off by “an order of magnitude.”
“Something doesn’t add up here, and my concern here is not is it 5, or 7 or 8 percent, but is it potentially 80 percent or 90 percent bots?” he tweeted.
Some skeptics believe Musk’s sudden concern over fake accounts is just a ploy to either reduce the purchase price for his takeover or even wriggle out of the deal altogether.
A number of observers believe the recent market collapse – which has seen Musk’s Tesla lose nearly a third of its value over the past month – could make buying Twitter more difficult on his wallet than anticipated.
After all, it’s not a new issue that popped up after he negotiated his takeover.
An analysis in 2018 found that 61 percent of Donald Trump’s followers – nearly 55 million at the time – were fake. More than a third of them weren’t just suspicious accounts, but matched 10 or more of the company’s warning signs.
And the problem is not confined to Trump or Biden.
Musk himself is a victim of fake followers, with SparkToro estimating that 70 percent of his 93.3 million followers are phonies.
Or as Musk might say…
