The audit tool found that 49.3 percent of accounts following the official @POTUS Twitter account are "fake followers" based on analysis of a number of factors, including location issues, default profile images and new users.
Half of US president Biden's Twitter followers are fake - Audit
Almost half of President Joe Biden's current 22.2 million followers on Twitter are fake accounts, according to an audit tool provided by software company SparkToro.
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Elon Musk, the world's richest man who is trying to buy Twitter, has expressed concerns about the number of fake accounts adding that his $44-billion deal to purchase the social media company could not go ahead until issues with fake accounts were resolved. He wants fake accounts found and deleted and if he succeeds in this endeavor, President Biden could lose half of his followers.
Musk says, "My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate," Musk wrote. "Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does."
It is not clear how Musk arrived at the 20 percent figure. He and Agrawal exchanged a series of tweets about the issue of fake accounts on Monday.
There is speculation that Musk might be using the issue of fake accounts to negotiate a better deal for Twitter, a perspective that president Trump hinted on last week.
SparkToro defines fake followers as "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 or because they're no longer active on Twitter)."
The software company's tool also found that Biden's account has more fake followers than most.
Musk announced on Twitter on Friday that the deal to buy the company was "temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users."
Musk's decision to put the deal on hold knocked 15 percent off Twitter's share price in pre-market trading on Friday.
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