Elon Musk Pauses Twitter Buyout After Report Reveals Biden's Followers are Bots—Almost 50% of Them

Elon Musk's Twitter buyout is still incomplete due to several issues. One of his major concerns is the spam and fake accounts that are on social media platforms.

Now, SparkToro, a software company based in the United States, published an audit report showing that the official Twitter account (@POTUS) of U.S. President Joe Biden has fake followers.

What makes this alarming for Musk is that around 11 million Twitter accounts following Biden are either fake or inactive. SparkToro said that this is almost 50% (49.3% to be exact) of @POTUS followers.

Elon Musk Pauses Twitter Buyout

According to The Daily Mail UK's latest report, decided to hold his $44 billion Twitter purchase due to bot account issues.

And it seems like this will worsen because of SparkToro's new report. The software firm explained that their matric takes into unreachable accounts.

This is because the company believes that these accounts may be bots, spam, propaganda-based accounts, or inactive users.

Aside from the government Twitter account that Biden uses, his personal account (@JoeBiden) was also analyzed by SparkToro.

It was revealed that around 43% of the total followers of Biden's personal Twitter account are fake. Since his profile has more than 32 million followers, the fake accounts are estimated to be more than 14 million.

This is definitely higher compared to the government Twitter account's bot and inactive followers.

Is Twitter Taking Action?

Newsweek reported that Twitter is making efforts to prevent fake and spam accounts from existing on the giant social media platform.

Parag Agrawal, the Twitter CEO, said that they are handling around 500,000 fake accounts each day so that real users will have to interact with or see them.

"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)," said Agrawal.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is still asking for the social media giant to reduce its fake accounts. Since Agrawal claims that less than 5% of Twitter users are bots.

The billionaire said that he thinks this is not the real case, claiming that around 20% of Twitter users are spam accounts.

As of writing, Elon is still putting his Twitter buyout on hold until Agrawal offers more proof.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Twitter bid private conversations were revealed in a new filing.

On the other hand, the billionaire said that he insists on Trump's Twitter return.

For more news updates about Elon Musk and his Twitter buyout, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

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Written by: Griffin Davis