Crypto Twitter has a persistent ‘fake followers’ problem, data reveals

Despite changes introduced by Twitter management since Elon Musk’s takeover, the issue around fake followers remains a persistent problem. As many as 10% of the followers of accounts belonging to crypto influencers and companies are fake, new data from dappGambl has revealed.

In April 2023, Musk introduced Twitter Blue — an $8 monthly subscription for verification — to increase the platform’s revenue while making it financially inviable for bots and fake accounts to operate. However, months later, dappGambl’s investigation found that up to 10% of followers from the most followed crypto accounts are fake.

When it comes to the official accounts of cryptocurrency tokens and ecosystems, Shiba Inu (SHIB) had the highest number of fake followers at 10.26% or 80,000 accounts, while Avalanche (AVAX) ranked second with 8.14% fake followers, followed by Polygon (MATIC) with 7.58% or 73,000 fake accounts.

dappGambl suspected that the relationship between Twitter accounts and their fake followers is dependent on the popularity of the tokens. By analyzing the social sentiment behind crypto accounts, dappGambl found that:

“Dai (DAI) is the most loved (popular) coin on Twitter whilst XRP (XRP) is the most hated (unpopular).”

Generally, the crypto community on Twitter sees DAI as the “future of money” while it tends to associate XRP with scams, states dappGambl.

When it comes to crypto influencers and entrepreneurs, Samson Mow boasts the highest percentage of fake followers among his total following. Mow is currently being followed by 26,000 fake accounts that represent 10% of his total following on Twitter.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has 560,000 (8.62%) fake followers, while El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had nearly 6.5% of fake followers among his total count.

Other prominent figures with substantial fake followers include MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor (6.16%), Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao (5.58%) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (4.76%) among others.

Based on the total number of followers, over 6.7 million fake accounts currently follow Musk as he tries to eradicate the very problem. Some of the methods to identify fake accounts are — checking when the account was created, investigating the profile picture, account bio and tweets sent out by the account and checking the account’s followers and following.

Related: Elon Musk imposes ‘rate limit’ on Twitter, citing extreme ‘system manipulation’

A popular Twitter bot that goes by the name of “Explain This Bob” was recently suspended after Musk called it a scam.

This sure looks like a scam crypto account. If so, it will be suspended.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 18, 2023

As Cointelegraph previously reported, the bot was created by Prabhu Biswal from India, which used OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to comprehend and provide responses to tweets by those who tagged the account.