{"id":1478993,"date":"2022-05-18T06:29:59","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T10:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1478993"},"modified":"2022-05-18T06:30:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T10:30:00","slug":"report-bidens-twitter-followers-about-as-real-as-his-votes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/report-bidens-twitter-followers-about-as-real-as-his-votes\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: Biden\u2019s Twitter Followers About as Real as His Votes"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Freport-bidens-twitter-followers-about-as-real-as-his-votes%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1478993&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2022\/05\/80210919-A320-4797-B656-2D2F473A82D1-scaled.jpeg?w=1200&#038;h=800&#038;ixlib=react-9.3.0\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Nearly half of President Joe Biden\u2019s Twitter followers are fake accounts, according to a report.<\/p>\n<p>An audit of Biden\u2019s official @POTUS Twitter account found that 49.3% of the Twitter users who follow the account are \u201cfake followers,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/half-joe-biden-twitter-followers-are-fake-audit-elon-musk-1707244\">Newsweek<\/a> initially reported Tuesday. To conduct the audit, Newsweek used a follower audit tool, called \u201cFake Followers,\u201d created by data analytics firm SparkToro.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/fake-followers\/potus\">Fake Followers<\/a> tool, which is available to use for free online, the @POTUS Twitter account has about 10.9 million \u201cfake followers\u201d out of 22.2 million total, which make up 49.3% of the account\u2019s followers. That number is relatively high for an account of that size. The median percentage of \u201cfake followers\u201d for an account of similar size is 41%, putting the @POTUS account on the high end of the spectrum. The low end of the spectrum for an account of similar size is about 25% \u201cfake followers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The tool defines \u201cfake followers\u201d as \u201caccounts that are unreachable and will not see the account\u2019s tweets (either because they\u2019re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they\u2019re no longer active on Twitter).\u201d To conduct the audit itself, the tool samples 2,000 random users picked from the 100,000 users who followed the audited account most recently. The tool then analyzes the followers, using more than 25 factors that correlate with \u201cspam\/bot\/low quality accounts.\u201d SparkToro notes that while none of these indicators alone point to a fake account, when multiple indicators are present, there is \u201cstrong correlation with low quality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to the tool, 81% of the audited sample consisted of followers who had created accounts in the last 90 days; 93% had profile URLs that were not correct; 91% had a \u201csuspiciously small number of followers\u201d; 88% \u201cfollow an unusually small number of accounts\u201d; 24% had a default profile picture; 45% had display names with spam-correlated signals; and 72% had spam-correlated signals in their biographies.<\/p>\n<p>Biden\u2019s personal account has a somewhat lower percentage of \u201cfake followers,\u201d according to the report. The audit tool found that the @JoeBiden account had 43% \u201cfake followers,\u201d equal to about 14.7 million followers out of about 34 million total. Biden\u2019s account was much more toward the median percentage than @POTUS. Still, some 55% of sampled followers had not been active for more than 120 days; 60% had a \u201csuspiciously small number of followers\u201d; 47% followed \u201can unusually small number of accounts\u201d; and 87% had suspicious profile URLs.<\/p>\n<p>SparkToro also conducted a large-scale audit of Twitter. In a blog post Sunday, SparkToro <a href=\"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twitter-analysis-19-42-of-active-accounts-are-fake-or-spam\/\">reported<\/a> the results of a joint audit with another firm called Followerwonk, of more than 44,000 accounts active in the last 90 days. The audit found that 19.42% of active accounts were likely to be fake. Also in its report, SparkToro estimated that 22.35% of accounts were fake, using data aggregated from the more than 500,000 accounts audited using the tool over 3.5 years. That percentage was four times more than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/elon-musk-publicly-calls-out-twitters-ceo-for-claims-about-spam-accounts\">Twitter\u2019s Q4 2021 estimate<\/a> of the percentage of spam accounts on the platform.<\/p>\n<p>SparkToro\u2019s figure was likely cited by billionaire <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/musk-doubt-about-spam-accounts-could-kill-twitter-deal\">Elon Musk<\/a> when he threw his agreement to buy the platform into question Tuesday. \u201c20% fake\/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher,\u201d Musk tweeted. \u201cMy offer was based on Twitter\u2019s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter\u2019s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%><\/5%><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly half of President Joe Biden\u2019s Twitter followers are fake accounts, according to a report.An audit of Biden\u2019s official @POTUS Twitter account found that 49.3% of the Twitter users who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":498,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1478993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/498"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1478993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1478993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1478993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1478993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}