More than half of Elon Musk's Twitter followers are fake accounts, according to online audit platform SparkToro.
Figures shown by SparkToro estimate that 53.3% of Musk's followers are fake followers, meaning they are spam accounts, bots, or no longer active.
The richest man in the world is currently in the process of acquiring Twitter. He promised to get rid of spam bots and fraudulent accounts on social media bearing the blue bird logo.
"If our bid to Twitter is successful, we will get rid of spam bots," he tweeted on April 21.
Twitter last week announced that it had received a $44 billion offer from Elon Musk, making it potentially one of the largest technology acquisitions in history. The deal between Musk and Twitter is expected to be finalized in October this year.
Musk currently has nearly 90 million Twitter followers, making his account the eighth most popular on the platform. Even for accounts with the same number of followers, Musk has a disproportionate number of fake followers, according to SparToro.
"This audit analyzed a random sample of 2,000 accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that followed @elonmusk, then looked at 25+ factors that correlated with spam/bot/low quality accounts," SparkToro explained as quoted from The Independent.
As Twitter's new owner, Musk also said he would "authenticate all real humans" as part of his crackdown on inauthentic activity.
Musk, who is also an outspoken cryptocurrency advocate, has in recent years been plagued by scammers. These online scammers often post their replies in an attempt to trick their followers into sending them bitcoins.
A common tactic of scammers is to impersonate the tech billionaire with a lookalike account, who then holds a sort of “crypto-prize quiz” that requires victims to send bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH) to receive double the amount in return.
A campaign tracked by The Independent in 2018 found that more than 400 people had fallen victim to this scam, with thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency being sent to cybercriminals.
Musk described crypto scammers as the single most vexing issue on Twitter, and when announcing Twitter's takeover bid last month, he said he wanted to make Twitter better than ever with new features and open source algorithms that increase user trust.