New Delhi: Tesla CEO and soon to be Twitter boss Elon Musk aims to crack down on spam bots, with nearly half of his own followers on the micro-blogging platform being fake.
As Time reports, about 48 percent of Musk’s 87.9 million followers (at the time of the research audit), according to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, are fake.
These are accounts that are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets because they are spam, bots, promotions, etc. or because they are no longer active on Twitter”.
Musk currently has around 90 million followers on Twitter.
According to SparkToro, they have about 7 percent more fake followers than the average 41 percent of accounts with similar sized followers.
The auditing tool found that “accounts that are on an unusually small number of lists, accounts that have no URL or non-resolving URL in their profile, and accounts that have a suspiciously low number of followers, some The most commonly observed traits were a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk”.
Spam bots are the “most annoying problem” on Twitter, Musk tweeted last month, as he successfully reached a $44 billion Twitter takeover deal.
“I want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, beat spam bots and authenticate all humans,” he tweeted.
“Twitter has tremendous potential. I look forward to working with the company and its community of users to unlock it,” said Musk, who plans to hire a new Twitter CEO.
In a TED interview last month, Musk said that crypto-based spam bots “make the product very bad.”
Musk has said that he will solve the problem by authenticating “all real humans” on the platform.
Not only Musk, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and former US President Barack Obama have fake followers of 46 percent and 44 percent for their respective followers of 58.4 million and 131.7 million.
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