Almost half of all the followers of President Joe Biden’s Twitter account are being discovered as fake accounts, according to a recent report.
In the wake of an audit of Biden’s official @POTUS Twitter account discovered that over 49.3% of the users following the account are “fark followers,” stated Newsweek in a Tuesday report. In order to conduct this audit, Newsweek used a known follower audit tool, named “Fake Followers,” which was originally created by data analytics from SparkToro.
As reported by the Fake Followers tool, which has been made available to all users for free online, the @POTUS Twitter account is currently sporting a whopping 10.9 million “fake followers’ of its total 22.2 million current followers, which equates out to roughly 49% of the account’s total following. The number is quite above the average for an account of its size. The standard median percentage of “fake followers” for an account of this size is about 41%, which seats the @POTUS account squarely on the high end of the spectrum. On the other hand, the lower end of the spectrum for an account of this size is roughly 25% “fake followers.”
The tool states that “fake followers” are “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).” In order to carry out the audit itself, the tool grabbed groups of 2,000 users at random from the previous 100,000 accounts which followed the audited account more recently. The tool then looks over the accounts and analyses them, making use of over 25 factors that seem to correlate with “spam/bot/low-quality accounts.” SparkToro also states that while not a single one of these indicators in a vacuum can point out a fake account, when the account manages to tick multiple boxes for these indicated, there is a “strong correlation with low quality.”
As reported by the tool, 81% of the audited samples were made up of followers that had created their accounts within the past 90 days; 91% had a “suspiciously small number of followers”; 93% ported URLs that were incorrect; 88% “follow an unusually small number of accounts”; 45% sported display names showing spam-corrected signals; 24% had a default profile picture; and 72% sported spam-correlated signals throughout the biographies.
The personal account for Biden seems to show a somewhat lower percentage of “fake followers,” stated the report adds. The auditing tool also discovered that the @JoeBiden account sports 43% “fake followers,” which equates out to 14.7 million followers out of roughly 34 million total. Biden’s personal account sat much closer to the standard media percentage than the @POTUS account. However, still some 55% of the accounts sampled by the tool had not been active for more than 120 days; 60% sported a “suspiciously small number of followers”; 47% were following “an unusually small number of accounts”; and a staggering 87% contained suspicious profile URLs.