Just what percentage of users on Twitter are ‘fake’ or ‘bots’? That’s the multi-billion dollar question right now, with Elon Musk hinting at a lower price for the deal, given he’s not convinced about the company’s user base. In fact, he has said that “fake users make up 20 per cent of all Twitter accounts.” Meanwhile, Twitter insists that only 5 per cent of its magnetizable Daily Active Users (DAUs) are fake or bots.
We take a look at everything that has been said about Twitter’s bot problem so far, what recent independent research claims, and why this is a hard problem to solve.
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The Tesla CEO has made a number of statements around this issue of bots, the latest being the claim about 20 per cent of users fakes, but he’s now insisting on more evidence from Twitter to back its claims that only 5 per cent of users are spam or fake.
He wrote in a new tweet, “20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher. My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Musk had tweeted on May 13 saying the deal was on hold till he could confirm the number of users, though two hours later he tweeted saying he was committed to the acquisition. More recently, he has posted that his team would do “a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter” to figure out the number of fake followers. He also invited others to carry out the same process.
Latest independent research
Another analysis by Twitter analytics tool Spark—an audience research tool company and Follower wonk—has claimed that “19.42% of public accounts that sent a tweet in the past 90 days are fake or spam.” The analysis was carried out between May 13 to May 15 and in a blog post, the researchers revealed that they looked at 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90 days and that these were selected randomly by machine from a set of 130+ million public, active profiles.
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The definition of spam here includes accounts “that do not regularly have a human being personally composing the content of their tweets, consuming the activity on their timeline, or engaging in the Twitter ecosystem,” according to their blog.
The researchers also looked at Elon Musk and his 93 million-plus followers and concluded that over 70.23 per cent of his followers are “unlikely to be authentic, active users who see his tweets.” They attributed the rise in fake followers to “Musk’s active use of Twitter, the media coverage of his tweets, and Twitter’s own recommendation systems.”
Some of the signals that Spark includes in its Fake Followers' analysis include looking at the profile image, the account age in days, the number of followers, days since the last tweet, days inactive, etc. Other signals considered are oversharing as spam accounts often tend to post a large volume of tweets on a daily basis, etc.
But keep in mind that Twitter has said these signals alone—say what looks like a fake profile picture—are not enough to define an account as fake or spam and the company itself includes a lot more in private and public data when making such decisions.
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The researchers claim their “methodology likely undercounts spam and fake accounts, but almost never includes false positives.” They also admitted that unlike Twitter they don’t have access to some other private data, which the company is likely using to rate accounts as fake or spam, and therefore their methodology could be flawed. However, they are confident that the number of spam or fake followers is being undercounted.
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