Data show crypto Twitter has a fake followers problem
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter prompted management to make changes, yet the problem of fake followers still exists. According to recent figures from dappGambl, up to 10% of crypto influencers and companies are fake.
Musk created Twitter Blue — an US$8 monthly membership for verification — in April 2023 to enhance the platform’s income while making bots and false accounts unprofitable.
However, dappGambl’s analysis revealed months later that up to 10% of followers from the most followed crypto accounts are phoney.
Shiba Inu SHIB US$0.000008 had the fakest followers among the official accounts of cryptocurrency tokens and ecosystems, with 10.26% or 80,000 accounts. Avalanche AVAX US$13.23 came in second with 8.14% fake followers, and Polygon MATIC US$0.7047 came in third with 7.58% or 73,000 fake accounts.
DappGambl had a hunch that the popularity of the tokens was related to the link between Twitter accounts and their false followers. Following a social sentiment analysis of cryptocurrency profiles, dappGambl discovered that:
“Dai (DAI) is the most loved (popular) coin on Twitter while XRP (XRP) is the most hated (unpopular).”
According to dappGambl, the cryptocurrency community on Twitter views Dai DAI US$1.00 as the “future of money,” but it often associates XRP US$0.49 with swindles.
Samson Mow has the greatest rate of phoney followers among all cryptocurrency influencers and business owners. The 26,000 bogus accounts that follow Mow presently account for 10% of his Twitter followers.
Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, has 560,000 (8.62%) phoney followers, while El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele and Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, have about 6.5% of fake followers overall.
Other well-known individuals with a sizable number of false followers include, among others, MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%), CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao (5.58%), and CEO of Tesla Elon Musk (4.76%).
According to the total number of followers, Musk is being followed by over 6.7 million phoney accounts while working to end the issue. Checking the account’s creation date, looking into the profile photo, account bio, and tweets the account has sent out, and looking into the account’s followers and whom it is following, are some ways to spot phoney accounts.
Musk just suspended Explain This Bob, a well-known Twitter bot, for being a hoax.
The bot, developed by Indian citizen Prabhu Biswal, utilized OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to understand and reply to tweets that tagged the account. Musk just suspended Explain This Bob, a well-known Twitter bot, for being a hoax.
