Data Shows “Fake Followers” Problem Persists on Crypto Twitter

Fake Followers on Crypto Influencers and Businesses Accounts

Despite alterations made by Twitter management since Elon Musk’s acquisition, the issue of counterfeit followers remains an ongoing issue. According to new information from dappGambl, up to 10% of the followers of accounts belonging to crypto influencers and businesses are fake.

In April 2023, Musk unveiled Twitter Blue – a $8 monthly subscription for verification – in an effort to boost the platform’s revenue and make it financially difficult for bots and fake accounts to operate.

When it pertains to the official social media accounts of cryptocurrency tokens and their respective ecosystems, Shiba Inu (SHIB) had the most counterfeit followers at 10.26%, or 80,000 accounts, with Avalanche (AVAX) coming in second with 8.14% of false followers, and Polygon (MATIC) following with 7.58%, or 73,000, fake accounts.

DappGambl suspected that the amount of fake followers on Twitter accounts is correlated to the popularity of the tokens. Upon examining the sentiment of crypto accounts, dappGambl concluded that:

The crypto community on Twitter generally views DAI as the “future of money” while they typically think of XRP as being associated with scams, according to dappGambl.

When discussing crypto influencers and entrepreneurs, Samson Mow has the highest proportion of fake followers out of his entire following. Currently, 10% of Mow’s Twitter followers, totaling 26,000, are fake accounts.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has 560,000 (8.62%) phony followers, while El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have almost 6.5% of false fans among their overall tally.

Other well-known personalities with notable amounts of counterfeit 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.

Methods to Identify Fraudulent Accounts and Rate Limit Implementation

Based on the amount of followers, Musk is attempting to eliminate the issue of over 6.7 million fake accounts. To identify these fraudulent accounts, there are several methods to utilize, such as determining when the account was created, examining the profile picture, account bio, tweets sent out, and looking at the accounts that the account is following and being followed by.

Elon Musk has implemented a “rate limit” on Twitter due to what he refers to as extreme “system manipulation”.

The Twitter bot known as “Explain This Bob” was recently taken down after Elon Musk labeled it as a scam.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Prabhu Biswal from India created a bot which employed OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to understand and respond to tweets that tagged the account.