Nearly half of Elon Musk’s 90 million Twitter followers are ‘fake’

 According to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, of Musk’s 87.9 million followers (at the time of the research audit), roughly 48 per cent are fake, reports Time

As Tesla CEO and soon-to-be Twitter boss Elon Musk aims to crack down on spam bots, nearly half of his own followers on the micro-blogging platform are fake. According to Twitter auditing tool SparkToro, of Musk’s 87.9 million followers (at the time of the research audit), roughly 48 per cent are fake, reports Time. These are the accounts that are “unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter”. Musk currently has nearly 90 million followers on Twitter.

He has nearly 7 per cent more fake followers than the median 41 per cent accounts with a similar sized followings have, according to SparkToro. The auditing tool found that “accounts that are on an unusually small number of lists, accounts that have no url or a non-resolving url in their profile, and accounts that have a suspiciously small number of followers were some of the most frequently observed traits of a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed Musk”….

Tesla CEO Elon Musk to testify in defamation case over ‘pedo guy’ tweet

In his opening statement, Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro told the jurors that his client meant no harm when he hit out at Unsworth and that his words were spoken in anger.

Tesla co-founder Elon Musk went on trial in Los Angeles in a defamation case involving a British caver he allegedly called a pedophile during a spat on Twitter. A jury of six women and two men were selected to hear the case with the tech billionnaire set to testify early on in the trial, possibly Tuesday afternoon.

Musk will likely be asked about his state of mind when he called British diver Vernon Unsworth — who helped rescue youth soccer players trapped in a cave in Thailand in July 2018 — “pedo guy” in a tweet. The 48-year-old entrepreneur had lashed out at Unsworth in a series of tweets after the latter dismissed Musk’s proposal to build a mini-submarine to rescue the youths as a “PR stunt.”

Unsworth said the custom-built device would never have fit in the cave and suggested that Elon Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.” In his opening statement, Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro told the jurors that his client meant no harm when he hit out at Unsworth and that his words were spoken in anger. “The tweets are not allegations of crimes, they are joking, taunting tweets in a fight between two men,” Spiro told the court.

He noted that Musk had apologized for the ‘pedo guy’ tweet and removed it from his feed, repeating his clients’ claim that the term was a common insult in South Africa, where Musk grew up. “Pedo guy (means) creepy old guy,” in South Africa, Spiro said. He added that Musk felt compelled to write the tweets as he was hurt by the suggestion that he was seeking publicity when he offered to help in the cave rescue...