Spam on Twitter: what if Elon Musk was right?

An analysis conducted by two marketing platforms seems to confirm and even amplify Elon Musk’s claim about the spam and fake accounts that plague Twitter.

To justify his disengagement (temporary or not, the future will tell) in the process of taking over Twitter, Elon Musk notably railed against the excessive number of spam and fake accounts. He believes that there is a lack of evidence that the latter represent far less than 5% of users. Market research tool SparkToro and social media marketing web platform Followerwonk conducted their parallel survey, May 13-15. And their conclusions on what is happening on the social network with the little blue bird come to reinforce the position of the billionaire, even if there is like the shadow of a doubt.

Nearly 2 in 10 Twitter accounts are fake or spam accounts

SparkToro and Followerwonk cast a wide net by analyzing some 44,058 public Twitter accounts and their activity over the past three months. They were randomly selected by computer from a total of 130 million active public profiles.

For the analysts, the finding is clear: 19.42% of the accounts examined under the magnifying glass would correspond to what they call ” a careful definition » fake accounts or spam accounts. Be careful, do not be mistaken: this does not mean that they do not know if these accounts are fake, no. In reality, this means that the real number of fake accounts and spam accounts is probably higher.

This data is in any case fundamental, since it is four times greater than that provided by Twitter to Elon Musk. The Tesla founder’s account itself is believed to be followed by only 23.42% of followers (out of 93.7 million) who tweeted at least once in the past 90 days.

Is Elon Musk manipulating his number of Twitter followers?

Conversely, analysts estimate that 70.23% of Elon Musk’s followers on the social network are unlikely to be genuine and active users, which is well above the average established around 19, 42%.

Note at the same time that after having ourselves analyzed the evolution of Elon Musk’s Twitter account, we noticed that it had gained 11.5 million subscribers in one month, which seems to us… far too many, obviously. In comparison, the singer Lady Gaga, who has an equivalent number of followers (84.7 million) and is in the news with the soundtrack of Top Gun: Maverick, lost 200 over the same period. From there to say that Elon Musk manipulated his number of followers to give meaning to his thesis, there is only one step, which we will not take, even if the question deserves to be asked. The stats from SparkToro and Followerwonk rather argue in his favour, and we note that 23.42% of accounts following Musk’s that have tweeted in the last 90 days are fake or spam, which is closer to the average previously mentioned.

In addition to this, the two companies explain that very large accounts are more likely to have a higher number of fake subscribers and spam accounts. This can be explained in particular by the media coverage and public interest they arouse, in addition to being directly recommended to new users.

Source : SparkToro