Elon Musk on Friday tweeted that his $44-billion cash deal for Twitter Inc was ‘temporarily on hold’ while he waits for the social media company to provide data on the proportion of its fake accounts.
Musk has now decided to take action against the bots or fake accounts of the microblogging site.
He asked his team to take a random sample of 100 followers on Twitter. “I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover…”.
To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter.
I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022
This month, Twitter Inc estimated in a filing that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter. It did not specify how that figure accounted for the automated, parody, and pseudonymous profiles permitted on the platform.
However, today much worse news came for Twitter:
Bot Sentinel, a platform that monitors millions of Twitter accounts, estimates that 10-15% of all accounts on Twitter are inauthentic.
One Person might have been close to the truth:
I'd say that at least the 50% of accounts are fake.
— Antidaniel (@Antidnl) May 14, 2022
After monitoring MSM’s Twitter accounts you can notice that well over 50% of their followers have never tweeted.
WSJ:
Of the last 10,000 to follow them, 5,020 have never tweeted.
Not including the retweet bots. (Significant)
NY Times:
Out of the New York Times’ last 10,000 last followers, 5,494 have never tweeted a day in their lives.
Well, CNN has 69% of accounts that have never been tweeted before.
The Economist:
Of their last 10,000 followers of The Economist, 5,257 have not tweeted yet
CNN:
CNN has 69% of accounts that have never tweeted before.
Let’s look at some of the politicians!
Joe Biden:
The last 10,000 followers of “President” Joe Biden… 5,895 of them had no tweets.
Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders’s last 10,000 followers, 4,979 of them have no tweets – very similar to AOC’s numbers.
Twitter is a cesspool of bots.
And Musk has a lot of work to do.
