Half of Joe Biden's Twitter Followers Are Fake, Audit Reveals

And?

We already know Twitter is infested with automated brainless parrots, i.e bot accounts plaguing the platform for years. This is why the way to solve it is to do what YouTube and Facebook has done and KYC everyone for that verified checkmark. As for those those bot accounts, they need to be on a leash tied to a KYC'd account so we know who it is from. Either way, I do not care what happens since the platform is close to impossible for any intelligent conversation anyway.

But someone has got to clean it up, Prag admitted he could not do it and now Elon wants to clean up the bot accounts.

We'll see what happens.

For context, an analysis estimated 70% of Elon Musk's followers are fake [0]. It suggests the following reasons:

> Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others

> Accounts that receive great deals of press coverage and public interest (like ex-President Trump and Mr. Musk) tend to attract more fake/spam followers than others

> Accounts that Twitter recommends to new users (which often includes @ElonMusk) tend to get more fake/spam followers

No doubt this is also true for Biden.

Seems to me that Musk et al should be less concerned about overall percentage of fake accounts than of these big numbers encountered on population accounts.

[0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twit...

Almost like Twitter has a massive problem with fake accounts. Or rather they don't seem to have a problem with it, people who care about truth have.

This seems needlessly political. According to the article, 70% of Elon Musk's followers are fake, based on the same measurements.

>Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently trying to buy Twitter, has expressed concerns about the number of fake accounts and a potential crack down could see users such as Biden lose a huge number of followers.

What if Musk was simply on a narcissistic vendetta and never actually intended to go through with the purchase, instead merely aiming expose the hot air on which twitter was running?

>We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam, if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," Agrawal wrote

How to mislead without lying: fake followers implicitly sanctioned by twitter are not necessarily spam accounts. This could easily be typical corporate speak, deliberately conflating fake follower numbers with spam accounts to suggest that twitter is "working on a solution" as opposed to acknowledging that twitter manipulates followers.

In any case I would imagine that the current board is less interested in the financial health of the company than they are in its use as an unprecedented political tool. Disinformation warnings are an authoritarian's wet dream.