Elon Musk reported that the sale of Twitter was on hold last week. This was after he stopped to challenge the number of fake accounts on the site. We’ve known for years that Twitter has millions of fake accounts. For Twitter to claim that only 5% of their accounts are fake, is a stretch based on TGP’s historical reporting.
Back in 2017 we looked at the number of Twitter accounts following President Trump and Hillary Clinton and found that not only did President Trump have twice as many followers as Hillary but Hillary had more fake accounts as a percentage than President Trump.
According to TwitterAudit.com 70% of President Trump’s 32 million followers are real.
22.5 million followers are real!
Only 66% of Hillary Clinton’s 16 million Twitter followers are real.
10.7 million Hillary Clinton followers are real.
Regardless, back in 2017 approximately 30% of President Trump and Hillary’s followers were fake accounts.
Today the same site claims that only 15% of Joe Biden’s followers are fake. This appears to be fake news because no one is following Joe Biden. We know this because no one showed up at his rallies and no one to this day follows him at all.
Musk is right to be concerned about the 5% number coming from the sample provided by Twitter.
In addition, a 5% error rate in a sample is huge. Any auditor knows this. If this were in the financial world it would be huge. The auditor would need to dig into the issue and determine what was going on. This could lead to millions in adjustments. With Twitter, this could lead to billions.
New tools are available to determine the real number of fake accounts on Twitter. A good bet is that it is much more than 5%.
