More than 23% of Elon Musk's Twitter followers are spam or fake accounts, research groups say

Elon Musk’s Twitter followers are likely 23% fake or spam accounts, two research groups says. Their analysis flagged users based on 17 warning signals that point to suspicious accounts. This comes as Musk disputes Twitter’s estimates that fewer than 5% of its accounts are fake. Loading Something is loading. More than 23.42% of billionaire Elon Musk’s 93 million followers on Twitter are likely fake or spam accounts, according to a joint audit by two research groups published Sunday.The two groups, SparkToro and Followerwonk, said their definitions of “fake” and “spam” accounts might not be the same as Twitter’s. They said they used a system of 17 warning signals, based on an algorithm that ran through 35,000 fake Twitter accounts bought by SparkToro and 50,000 accounts the teams marked as non-spam.If one of Musk’s followers was flagged for multiple spam signals, they graded it as low quality or fake, they said. When factoring in inactive users, which the researchers defined as accounts that haven’t tweeted in 90 days, a total 70.23% of Musk’s followers were unlikely to be “authentic” or “active users who see his tweets,” they said.Fake accounts by the numbersAnalyzing all of Musk’s nearly 100 million followers, they found that…
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