19.42% of active Twitter accounts are bots… or fake (four times more than advertised) – Marketing 4 Ecommerce – Your online marketing magazine for e-commerce

This has been a controversial and difficult year for Twitter that has been in the midst of anticipation after the announcement of . While the millionaire tycoon already owns the microblogging social network, the announcement of his purchase and the possible changes that would come to the platform have been taken as fact in recent weeks…only for disappointment (and the actions of Twitter) fell after the social network. The main reason: the calculation of false accounts or bots that could be inhabiting the social network of the little blue bird.

At the end of the day, disappointments and stock market crashes included, this action makes sense if we stop to think that the bots and fake accounts on Twitter throughout its history, and who would pay millions of dollars for a social network without knowing how many real active accounts do you really own? As from here will start the success (or failure) of your subscription and advertising strategies.

And it is that although Twitter ensures that bots and fake accounts on its platform represent less than 5% of its total users, Twitter’s audit tool claims that this figure could rise to almost 20%.

The SparkToro study was conducted from May 13 to 15, 2022, taking a sample of 44,058 active public Twitter accounts in the last 90 days. The accounts were randomly selected from over 130 million public active profiles, finding that 19.42% of these accounts are bots or fake, which is nearly four times Twitter’s Q4 2021 estimate.

To reach this conclusion, the study applied bot or fake account analysis based on unique data sets:

1. 1. The display of active user profiles. The indexed database in Fllowerwonk is currently 1047,000 million twitter profiles, taking into account a random sample between public and active profiles in the last 9 weeks.
   2. Aggregate average of fake followers tool. This SparkToro fake follower tool was run on 501,532 unique accounts analyzing thousands of followers for each of them, giving a total of over a billion profiles.
   3. All followers of on Twitter (93.4 million accounts. Given the interest in Musk’s account and the central role it has played in this report, a full analysis of the nearly 100 million accounts that follow Elon Musk, including older profiles, has been incorporated who haven’t tweeted in the last 90 days.
   4. Active followers of the @ElonMusk account on Twitter (26.8 million accounts). Musk’s followers who have been active in the last three months were analyzed.
   5. Random sample of 100 users who follow the @Twitter account. This step was done following the recommendation of Musk who posted on his profile that his “team will do a random sample of 100 followers of the official Twitter account. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.” SparkToro’s research only included public accounts that tweeted in the last 90 days, and only accounts created before May 2021.
   6. Estimate from Twitter’s most recent earnings report (unknown number of accounts). The report cited by Musk in his recent tweet shares that less than 5% of his platform’s monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are bot or fake accounts. These data are included in the graphs for comparison even though their methodology was not disclosed.

Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

More than 70% of Elon Musk’s followers could be bots or fake accounts

According to the parameters of the investigation 70.23% of the total followers of @ElonMusk could be bots or fake accounts, however, this figure is well above the average, which could have several reasons behind it:

• Very large accounts tend to have a higher number of bot followers or fake accounts what others.
• The accounts that Twitter recommends to new users (which also often includes Elon Musk’s account), they also tend to get more fake followers or bots compared to regular accounts.

For the analysis of followers with active accounts following @ElonMusk who have tweeted in the last 90 days, it was found that 23.42% of them are probably fake or bot accountsa number that is closer to the estimated global average.

Either way, this figure is well above the average that Twitter declaredand will no doubt modify the sales agreements, if Musk finally decides to buy the microblogging social network.

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