Half of Joe Biden Twitter followers fake, says report. Elon Musk has this to say

Elon Musk's deal to take over Twitter is presently on hold.

Elon Musk -- who has put his acquisition of Twitter on hold until clarity on the number of spam bots the platform has -- has commented on a report which says that 50 per cent of US President Joe Biden's Twitter followers are fake.

According to the details released by Twitter, the bots are about 5 per cent of the active users.

Elon Musk, however, disagrees.

"Interesting. So … [checks calculator] … that would be like 10 times more than 5%," Musk commented on the report on Biden's Twitter followers.

So … [checks calculator] … that would be like 10 times more than 5%

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022

Or 14 times higher than Twitter’s 5% in my case

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022

According to the Newsweek report, an audit tool provided by software company SparkToro found that 49.3 per cent of accounts following the official @POTUS Twitter account are "fake followers". The findings were based on  a number of factors such as default profile images, location issues, and new users.

Hours earlier, Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal defended the platform’s battle against bots. "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)," he wrote on a Twitter thread.

Agrawal added that the most challenging aspect is that many accounts which look fake are actually real people. "And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface," he said.

The Twitter CEO also said that fewer than 5 per cent of active accounts on any given day were spam. The analysis, however, cannot be replicated externally to protect user data privacy.