Elon Musk’s Twitter Bumps Into Persistent Issues of Fake Followers in Crypto Space

Changes have been made since Elon Musk took control of Twitter to address the issue of phony followers in the bitcoin sector. Twitter Blue, a $8 per month membership for verification, was announced in April 2023 with the goal of boosting platform income while preventing bots and false accounts. Even still, new data from dappGambl shows that the problem is still there, with up to 10% of major cryptocurrency accounts’ followers being false.

Fake Followers and the Love-Hate Relationship with Cryptocurrencies

When DappGambl looked into the relationship between Twitter accounts and their false followers, they found that there was a correlation between the frequency of fake followers and the popularity of particular tokens. Shiba Inu (SHIB), followed by Avalanche (AVAX) with 8.14% and Polygon (MATIC) with 7.58% or 73,000 bogus accounts, topped the list of official accounts for cryptocurrency tokens and ecosystems.

Dai (DAI) emerged as the most adored and well-liked currency on Twitter, while XRP (XRP) was the most despised and disliked, according to dappGambl’s research of social opinion. Dai is frequently referred to as the “future of money” by the crypto community on Twitter, whereas XRP is frequently connected to rip-offs.

Leading Crypto Influencers and Their Fake Followers

The analysis turned out some unexpected results regarding crypto entrepreneurs and influencers. With 10% of his overall Twitter following made out of phony followers, Samson Mow stood out as having the highest percentage. While Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, and Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, each had about 6.5% of phony followers in their total counts, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had 8.62% fraudulent followers.

Other well-known individuals with a sizable amount of false followers include, among others, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (4.76%), Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (5.58%), and MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%).

Addressing the Issue and Identifying Fake Accounts

Despite his best efforts, Elon Musk still has over 6.7 million phony accounts following him. Analyzing a variety of indicators carefully is necessary to spot phony accounts. Examining the account’s inception date, looking into the profile photo, account bio, and tweets, as well as looking closely at the account’s followers and followings, are a few techniques.

Recent action against phony accounts by Elon Musk resulted in the suspension of the well-known Twitter bot “Explain This Bob” after Musk called it a fraud.