Eighty percent of Twitter accounts are fake, says new report

A report published last week by a former CIA and FBI cyber security analyst found that as many as 8 out of 10 Twitter accounts are fake, or “bots,” reported the Daily Wire. 

The report, published by cyber security firm F5’s Head of Global Intelligence Dan Woods, comes after billionaire Elon Musk scuttled his acquisition of Twitter in July, accusing the social media giant of making false claims about its percentage of fake accounts.  

While the company maintained that only around 5% of Twitter accounts are bots, Musk insisted it was higher, which could mean that advertisers have been defrauded for years. 

“There is some chance it might be over 90% of daily active users, which is the metric that matters to advertisers,” wrote Musk in May. “Very odd that the most popular tweets of all time were only liked by ~2% of daily active users.” 

Twitter has since sued Musk for backing out of the deal, insisting that its monetized daily active users (mDAU) are about 95% of all accounts. The trial is set for October. 

But according to Dan Woods, Musk was likely closer to the truth. 

“I’m not a programmer, but I watched YouTube and in a weekend I wrote a script that automatically creates accounts on Twitter without encountering any obstacles,” Woods told The Australian. “There’s huge demand [for bots], there’s a marketplace to serve that demand and if I can write a bot that creates accounts on Twitter, and I’m not even a programmer, imagine what a sophisticated programmer could do. Twitter doesn’t want (its number of bots) to be that high, so they’re going through the motions of cancelling some accounts.” 

“I’m not saying they’re lying,” he added. “but we’ve really studied these accounts and we’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot more fake accounts than Twitter is letting on.” 

“Sure sounds higher than 5%!” tweeted Musk Thursday in response to the report.

A whistleblower complaint by Twitter’s former Head of Security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko published last month alleged that “Musk is correct: Twitter executives have little or no personal incentive to accurately ‘detect’ or measure the prevalence of spam bots.” When Mudge asked Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth what percentage of Twitter accounts were fake, Roth replied, “We don’t really know.” 

Musk was also vindicated in May by a Newsweek report which found that nearly half of Joe Biden’s Twitter followers are fake accounts. Indeed, a quick scroll through Joe Biden’s followers past the initial “blue check” users reveals a nearly endless list of users with zero followers, some with photos and some without. 

America's Frontline News reported in May that the social media platform in recent months has been outed as a Communist-driven enterprise whose executives outwardly admit to censorship because “people don't know how to make rational decisions.”

One executive, Twitter Lead Client Partner Alex Martinez, was caught by Project Veritas on hidden camera mocking Elon Musk for having Asperger's Syndrome.