One of Elon Musk’s main priorities for Twitter after his $44 billion deal to acquire the social media company was to take strong actions against the so-called “bots.”
But there’s a problem with that plan: almost half of Elon Musk’s followers are bots or inactive accounts. Yes, the account with the most followers on the social media platform X has over 60 million bots among its ranks.
Who are Musk’s followers in relation to the platform? How active are they? How often do they post? Do they consume a lot of content from creators on X? Are they subscribed to Musk’s subscription plan, X Premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue? Are Musk’s followers real?
A very uncomfortable truth for Elon Musk
Mashable magazine has reviewed the new data collected by external researcher Travis Brown, who gathered basic information from the accounts of all of Musk’s over 153 million followers through a meticulous process that adhered to X’s rate limit parameters.
The question for most people is whether Musk’s followers are fake. And “inactive” is the word that best describes what the data reveals.
Are Elon Musk’s followers smoke and mirrors?
Out of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, about 42% of Musk’s followers, or over 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own accounts.
A little over 72%, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have fewer than 10 followers on their account.
As for content creation on the platform, 62.5 million of Musk’s followers have zero tweets. This would include users who have deleted all their tweets at the time the data was collected in the past few weeks, as well as accounts that have never tweeted before.
More than 100 million of Musk’s followers have fewer than 10 tweets posted on their account. Another interesting detail from Musk’s follower data is when exactly they created their accounts.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022. Out of all of Musk’s current followers, over 25 percent, or 38.9 million, were created on that date or after.
And here’s the brutal truth: the median number of followers for the 153 million accounts following Musk is just one follower. The uncomfortable truth about Elon Musk lies in his followers.
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