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

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.