Over 23% of Musk's Twitter followers are fake: research group

Team says accounts flagged as spam were 'guilty of peddling propaganda and disinformation'

Over 23.42 per cent of Elon Musk's 93 million Twitter followers are fake or spam accounts, according to a joint audit by two research groups published recently.

The groups, SparkToro and Followerwonk, said that their definition of 'spam' and 'fake' might differ from that of the micro-blogging site.

Using a system of 17 warning signals on an algorithm that ran 35,000 fake Twitter accounts bought by SparkToro, the team said that 50,000 accounts were marked as non-spam.

According to the team, if one of the billionaire's followers was flagged for multiple spam signals, they were graded as low-quality or fake. Researchers also took into account inactive users who hadn't tweeted in 90 days, which formed 70.23% of Musk's followers.

The research team analysed Musk's Twitter followers and discovered that 73% had spam-correlated keywords on their profiles and 71% used locations that didn't match any place.

Moreover, 41% of the accounts had display names that followed patterns generally used by spam accounts. A large chunk of 69% of accounts had also been inactive for more than 120 days.

Eighty-three per cent of the followers had a "suspiciously small number of followers" and 78% followed an "unusually small number of accounts."

The teams also additionally used metrics like age of the account, number of tweets over a period of time and the use of Twitter's default profile picture for thorough analysis.

SparkToro defined fake accounts as being "those 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."

In its analysis, the team noted that the fake or spam accounts were not necessarily problematic since they could be bots that aggregate news and tweet photos from around the world. However, accounts flagged as spam were "guilty of peddling propaganda and disinformation, pushing phishing attempts or malware, manipulating stocks and cryptocurrencies, and trying to harass other users," according to Business Insider.

The assessment came as Musk announced last week his intention of putting his $44 billion Twitter deal on hold as the company provides data to prove that less than 5% of the followers are fake.

Twitter CEO, Prag Agarwal, in a heated debate with Musk, defended Twitter's numbers and claimed the company suspended half a million spam accounts every day.