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Despite changes made by Twitter management after Elon Musk took over, the issue of fake followers remains an ongoing problem. New data from dappGambl has revealed that up to 10% of followers of accounts owned by cryptocurrency influencers and companies are fake.
In April 2023, Musk introduced Twitter Blue — an $8 monthly subscription for verification — to boost the platform’s revenue by making it financially unfeasible for bots and fake accounts to operate. However, a few months later, a dappGambl investigation revealed that up to 10% of the followers from the most popular cryptocurrency accounts are fake.
In terms of official cryptocurrency token accounts and ecosystems, Shiba Inu (SHIB) had the highest number of fake followers at 10.26% or 80,000 accounts, while Avalanche (AVAX) came in second with 8.14% of fake followers. , followed by Polygon (MATIC.) with 7.58% or 73,000 fake accounts.
dappGambl suspects that the relationship between Twitter accounts and their fake followers depends on the popularity of the tokens. By analyzing the social sentiment associated with cryptocurrency accounts, dappGambl found that:
“Dai (DAI) is the most liked (popular) coin on Twitter and XRP (XRP) is the most hated (unpopular).”
Generally, the cryptocurrency community on Twitter sees DAI as “the future of money,” while it tends to associate XRP with scams, dappGambl claims.
Twitter-Has-a-Persistent-Problem-of-Fake-Followers-Data.jpg"/>When it comes to cryptocurrency influencers and entrepreneurs, Samson Mow boasts the highest percentage of fake followers of all of his followers. Moe is currently followed by 26,000 fake accounts, which is 10% of his total Twitter followers.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has 560,000 (8.62%) fake followers, while President Salvador Nayib Bukele and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have nearly 6.5% fake followers among his total.
Other prominent figures with high numbers of fake followers include MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%), Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (5.58%), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (4.76%).
Judging by the total number of followers, more than 6.7 million fake accounts are currently following Musk, who is trying to eradicate the problem itself. Some of the methods for identifying fake accounts are: checking when the account was created, examining the profile picture, account bio and tweets sent by the account, and checking the followers and followers of the account.
Related: Elon Musk introduces ‘speed limit’ on Twitter, citing extreme ‘system manipulation’
A popular Twitter bot called “Explain That Bob” was recently suspended after Musk called it a scam.
This sure looks like a scam cryptocurrency account. If so, it will be suspended.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 18, 2023
As previously reported, the bot was created by Prabhu Biswal from India, who used the OpenAI GPT-4 model to understand and respond to the tweets of those who tagged the account.